Daddy's Gone A Hunting
by cowgirlfromhell
Summary: Mary's been dead for five years and John's no closer to finding the Yellow Eyed Demon but may have to face a demon of his own. Prequel to Nocturnal Omissions.
1. Chapter 1

Daddy's Gone A Hunting

Bye, oh Baby Bunting

Daddy's gone a hunting

To get a little rabbit skin

To wrap his Baby Bunting in

Bye, oh Baby Bunting

Mommy's gone a missing

Exchanging life for dark destine

To wrap her Baby Bunting in

Bye, oh Baby Bunting

Brother's gone a hunting

Exchanging light for darkening

To wrap his Baby Bunting in

Bye, oh Baby Bunting

Baby's gone a struggling

A heart and soul to lose or win

To wrap the Baby Bunting in

Bye, oh Baby Bunting

Daddy's gone a hunting

To get an evil demon's skin

To wrap his Baby Bunting in

Georgetown, Colorado 1988

Lights twinkled in the gently falling snow and frozen night air like jewels nestled in the cleavage of the mountains rising up on either side of the small mountain town. Downtown on 6th Street the Red Ram Saloon was filling to capacity as the après-ski crowd, detoured off of the Interstate until an avalanche could be cleared, piled in after a long day of shushing champagne powder at Copper Mountain, Keystone, Breckenridge and Arapahoe Basin, known to the locals as A-Basin.

A few of the remaining Molybdenum miners in the area, as well as a few locals, and one time warping hippie sat at tables reserved for them by virtue of their many years of boozing in the downstairs bar. The wait staff, made up primarily of ski bums who traveled with the snow only to be replaced by mud ducks too broke to leave town in the spring, hustled through the smoke filled rooms delivering Coors beer, huge, honking hamburgers with fries, Coors beer, tasty steaks and onion rings, Coors beer, Mexican food that tasted as good as could be expected when cooked by a guy named Olafson and more Coors beer.

Jewels Downey, the thirty something bar manager, had been pressed into duty and schlepped a huge tray ladened with food and drinks seemingly effortlessly through the throng of people queuing up for standing room only inside the bar as the town quickly filled up with even more displaced travelers. As she positioned the last item on her tray in front of a hungry customer she saw a tall, well built man come in out of the cold herding two young boys before him, one reluctant and hanging back, the other champing at the bit to get inside and frowned.

Brushing snow from his dark hair the father's eyes locked with hers for a moment before he lowered his gaze, her scowl not lost on him. A bar was no place for kids.


	2. Chapter 2

Dean Winchester, nine years old going on forty, surveyed the bar with the hardened eyes of a first recon platoon soldier. He gave a cursory look around the interior noting first the exits, then the dead, stuffed animals hung all over the place and finally the mouthwatering aromas wafting from the kitchen all the while a pretty blonde waitress was giving the three of them the stink eye. He sighed and couldn't wait until he was old enough to walk into a bar whenever the mood struck him and not raise eyebrows or moral indignation which, for him, currently translated into the dreaded "stink eye".

John Winchester searched for an empty table and, finding none, headed toward the bar with Sam and Dean in tow only to be cut off by Ol' Stink Eye.

"No kids allowed at the bar," Jewels explained looking him straight in the eye. She noted the dark circles beneath his hollow looking eyes and the deep creases bracketing his mouth. He had a couple days growth of dark beard and a couple months of shaggy, dark hair but even that couldn't hide the fact that he was an extremely handsome man, albeit with the weight of the world on his broad shoulders.

The two boys also had longish, fair hair but looked reasonably clean despite their torn, patched jeans and worn jackets. The younger of the two boys leaned back into his father's muscular legs. Dad placed his hand gently on the boy's thin shoulder in reassurance as the youngster looked up at her with haunted green eyes before turning his face into the strong legs while the older brother instinctively moved to place his body protectively between her's and that of his sibling's.

Folding his arms across his chest the older boy gave her a wink and Jewels snorted incredulously while the father just said, "It don't matter," in a quiet voice, resigned to going back out into the cold night.

Jewels sighed. "Look Mister, it's a mad house in here tonight," she said stating the obvious as even more people came through the door, "But if you and your boys don't mind eating with the help I can seat you at the employee's table."

Both boys turned to look up at him beseechingly and John smiled, "We'll sit in the kitchen if we have to."

It was a killer smile, Jewels noted, as she turned and led the way to a cordoned off area. She set menus down on the vacant table while the three of them took their seats. "I'll be back with some water," she told them and hurried off.

As they waited Sam began to shiver and John pulled the boy's chair closer to his and, shucking off his down jacket, draped it solicitously over his son's legs. "We'll get some food into you, Sammy, then you can go to sleep," he promised the travel weary five year old, "You too, Dean."

"But the night's still young," Dean complained and John just shook his head and opened his menu.

The waitress reappeared with three glasses of water and, when one of the bartenders came up to her complaining about a shortage of alcohol, Dean found out her name was Jewels and not Stink Eye after all. She lined the barman out and waited patiently for father and sons to read over the menu. "Are you ready to order?" she asked after a few minutes and pulled an order pad from the pocket of her over-sized, grey sweater.

"So tell me, Jewels," Dean spoke up before John could shut him down, "What do you recommend?"

"Well," she replied tapping a finger thoughtfully on her full bottom lip, "For starters I suggest reform school."

John let out a hearty laugh and Sam, not really getting the joke but hearing his father's laughter, relaxed for the first time since entering the restaurant and gave her a gapped tooth grin.

"Touché, Jewels," John said and added, "I'm John Winchester and these are my boys, Sam and Dean."

"I recommend the steak...and the cook makes a mean cheeseburger," she suggested then said to Dean, "You look like a cheeseburger kind a guy."

"Sold!" he told her then added fries and a drink to his order.

Sam wanted nothing more than soup and John ordered the steak and bourbon neat when she asked if he wanted anything from the bar. When Jewels saw that Dean was going to speak up she threatened him, "The only thing I'll bring you from the bar is a Shirley Temple and I'll make sure everyone in this place knows it's for you."

Mortified at the thought of being served a baby drink named after a girl Dean looked at her and could see she wasn't bluffing. "I'll pass on the alcohol," he told her.

"I figured as much," she said shaking her heard as she headed toward the kitchen order in hand.

Jewels pulled draws while she waited behind the bar for the food and, after serving the Winchesters, Jewels retreated behind the bar again only this time she went into the office to take a quick inventory. She had laid in extra food and drink for exactly the reason the bar was packed and knew they were in good shape. The I-70 corridor was notorious for avalanches, usually further up by the Eisenhower Tunnel or at any mile marker on Berthoud pass, but this one had come straight down just after the turnoff for the town and if a person hadn't booked one of the motel room as they first got off the Interstate they were more than likely shit out of luck.

She hoped papa Winchester had had the foresight to do just that as the little one, Sam, looked tuckered out. Jewel was pretty sure the older boy, Dean, would be up late into the night watching dreadful old movies after hot wiring the magic fingers machine. It had been a long, long days and she herself couldn't wait to turn out the lights and lock up the doors of the Ram.

Jewels hated running the place but the owner, Mari, had jetted off to some equally small town back east to scout out another bar, the exotic, dark haired owner always on the lookout for a quick turn around on her money. She was loaded and making more by the minute as Jewels sat at the desk to start entering the afternoon's receipts into the books. An hour had quickly passed when she heard a knock on the door. Before she could answer, to her surprise but not totally unexpected, Dean Winchester opened the door and popped in. "How was your burger?" she asked him.

"Best cheeseburger I've had so far and I'm aiming to try 'em all," he told her earnestly.

"I bet you are," she said with a crooked smile, "What can I do for you, Dean?"

"Well, we were wondering about the check…"

"Oh!" she exclaimed standing up, "I've got it right here." She fished her pad out of her pocket and explained, "I'm the manager and only take orders when we're slammed."

Dean nodded his head and said, "Well, then I guess you're the one I need to talk to anyway."

Jewels looked at him with a jaundiced eye and waited expectantly.

"I just wanted ya to know that we're gonna stiff ya," he told her candidly and Jewels could almost see the wheels turning as he continued, "Not 'cause the food wasn't good, 'cause it was most excellent, like the service, but because, well, it's my dad. His mom…my granny," the boy added quickly to give credence to the whopper he was in the process of telling her, "she's sick...dying really and we've been sending every penny, even the nickel an hour Sammy makes shoveling snow…"

"_More like shoveling shit,"_ Jewels though but let him continue.

"…home to her so we don't really have the money to pay you for the grub so if you could find it in your heart to not call the cops, I'd really appreciate it and I could pay you back, shovel off your sidewalk out front, help out the bartender, wash the glasses..."

A picture of John Winchester's precious first born standing on a beer keg behind the bar finishing off the half empty glasses of alcohol bussed to the washing station flashed in her mind and, when she looked at him as if he were crazy, Dean stopped talking. She wasn't buying any of it, he realized, and started to inch his way back toward the door until he was able to bolt out and around the bar and back to the table.

Jewels followed him out and laid the ticket for their meal on the bar and wrote, "PAID" across the front then, flipping it over, she wrote her address and where they could find her spare key on the back.

Dean slid back into his seat and watched as she came out from behind the bar and walked purposefully toward them. Unaware anything was amiss John continued drinking his coffee and smiled charmingly at her. His smile fading away quickly when she stopped and stood glowering down at him and, slapping the ticket down on the table, she said, "I know dear old Granny Winchester wouldn't want her grandbabies sleeping in your car. It's supposed to get down to ten below." and, turning on her heel, she headed back into her office.

John immediately turned to Dean and asked, "What did you say to her?"

"I've never seen that woman before in my life," Dean deadpanned picking up the ticket and, reading the note on the back, he added, "but I think I'd like to get to know her better."

Grabbing the ticket John read the note and sighed. He knew he had only himself to blame.


	3. Chapter 3

Jewels' house was small, tiny almost; only one story with walls made out of stone and covered in plaster. Dean thought it looked like a Smurf's house but it was warm and inviting and filled with all kinds of old junk.

John had found the key easily enough and, when the three of them trudged inside, the house seemed to expand to welcome them. The living room was bathed in soft light from old wall sconces that barely threw more light than a candle and from a myriad of lights on a real Christmas tree, while a pellet stove worked its magic keeping the place heated.

Sam, fascinated by the sparkling lights of the tree, just stood before it and stared. It reminded John of a Rockwell illustration straight out of a magazine and later, when the boys were asleep, he thought back to his youngest son's awestruck face lit by golden light and felt his heart break.

The snow crunched loudly under her boots in the relative quiet of what Jewels like to call the "drunking" hour. The sixty minutes between last call at two and three in the morning when all the final goodbye shouts of the last drunks finally died out. The bitter cold seemed to have driven everyone else in the town inside except for the town's very own Barney Fife, whose police cruiser drove slowly by as she made her usual trek from The Ram to her modest home on Taos Street next to the tiny creek that ran through town.

It was almost the end of December, a few days before Christmas, and the creek was deceptively quiet and frozen over in spots. In a few short months it could quickly turn deadly when the runoff was in full swing. The lake at the east end of town was also frozen over with an ice crust almost three feet thick and the ice races were in full swing for those daring enough to put runners on their sail boards or studs in their snow tires.

As Jewels came up to her house on the corner of eighth and Taos and saw the unfamiliar black car parked in the driveway she wondered just what in the hell she had been thinking. Always a sucker for a handsome man, especially one with sad, bedroom eyes, she wondered if she'd invited an axe murderer and his accomplices to spend the night. Maybe Sam had just been a ruse to melt her heart and make her feel sorry for them while Dean, well he definitely could be a midget. Whatever, the damage was done and her grisly murder would give Barney something to do in between rushing all the young guys that had taken ill in the past few weeks down to the Idaho Springs Medical Center only to be transported to Denver to eventually die in the hospital there.

The CDC had sent doctors and researchers to Colorado to check out the Ram, along with most of the other businesses in town, and they had all been given a clean bill of health. The whole affair creeped Jewels out to no end. She had known those guys, had served them many, many times and had cried when she'd heard that none of them had recovered. It reminded her of Viet Nam and the many times she'd cried over the boys she couldn't save there and of her husband who had made it back from the war only to die high up in the Rockies. But what the hey, she thought lifting the old-fashioned latch handle on the door, she'd lived to the ripe old age of thirty-four and had had a moderately good life and anyway, she was kind of partial to that little wise ass, Dean Winchester.

Jewels stepped into her small foyer and sat down on the ladder-back chair to pull off her boots then hung her full-length, black nylon, down filled coat, her "Colorado mink" on one of the hooks on the wall. Three other jackets hung neatly on the other hooks and she wondered how they had made out in her humble abode with only two-bedrooms, very little food in the tiny kitchen, a small black and white television with tin foiled rabbit ears and no magic fingers for Dean.

When she came into the living room she saw papa Winchester stretched out on the couch, his feet hanging over the arm, snoring softly. She tiptoed into the guest bedroom and could make out the two lumps in the full size bed that took up most of the room and just stood and stared for a moment, quite satisfied with her impulsive invitation. She turned around and bumped into John. "Jumped up Jesus on a stick," she whispered harshly placing her hand on her chest, "You scared the crap out of me."

"I'm sorry," he whispered back, "I tried to wait up, to see you got home safely. I would have picked you up if I'd have known when your shift was over."

She wanted to laugh as she looked into his eyes. The safest place for her was probably back outside in the cold because his consideration touched her and she was also a sucker for a gentleman.

"I hope it was okay to put them in there."

She nodded her head and made her way past him and back into the living room and pointed to the couch. "You don't really fit. Why don't you sleep in my room?"

John didn't say a word just looked at her and Jewels back peddled. "I mean, I'll sleep here on the couch and you can take my bed. I just changed the sheets this morning and…"

"The couch is fine," John told her smiling and tried to joke with her, "If I took your bed I know you wouldn't respect me in the morning."

"And you think I respect you now?" she murmured softly but angrily, "Where do you get off ordering food you had no intention of paying for and then sending your son to do your dirty work?" Jewels found herself suddenly indignant for the man's sons, especially the oldest who seemed to believe he needed to take care of his father and brother both. She was ready to lay into him more but she could see her harsh accusations had hurt him as every emotion showed as plain as day in his eyes.

Sighing John backed away from her and walked over to a triangular shadowbox sitting on the antique writing desk. After he'd bedded down his boys he'd had time to look around her place, to check it for any traps or possible hell mouths and had come across the display which held a triangular folded American flag in the top compartment and various medals, including the VMS medal, a silver star and an Air Force Cross, along with a maroon beret in the bottom. Also prominently displayed were service ribbons, the 'fruit salad' worn on a soldier's uniform, including a ribbon for service in Viet Nam. A worn silver and black patch with the noble motto "That Others May Live" was pinned to the flag.

"Your husband?" John asked knowing that he was not in the house and no longer a part of her everyday life, for whatever reason. Jewels smiled wanly and nodded her head and, thinking that he had been a casualty of war, he asked her, "Where did he die?" and was shocked when she told him.

"Right up in these mountains," she said pointing in the direction of the back ridge of high peaks, "Put a gun in his mouth and blew away the back of his head." Her face remained passive as she had accepted the fact that he was gone, had been gone long before he took his life.

John then told her, "It's not safe for you to invite total strangers into your home if you're alone."

"Even if they do have cute kids?"

"Especially."

"Listen, John Winchester," she explained to him," the only reason I took pity on you was because you said the three magic words, the words any Viet Nam Vet knows is a cry for help."

"It don't matter," he repeated remembering what he'd said to her when she was going to kick them out of the bar.

"But it does," she said smiling, "There are blankets in the hall closet."


	4. Chapter 4

Dean Winchester rolled over in the big double bed and accidentally threw his arm over his brother's chest. Eyes snapping open he scrambled back across the invisible "no crossies" line onto his own side. He hated sleeping in the same bed as his brother. He more often than not had the second motel room bed all to himself because his dad usually stayed away all-night or even for days at a time for that matter. But they were together again, one big happy family, stuck in a crappy town where it had to be at least fifty degrees below zero, crammed together in Smurfette's house while his father decided what to do next, sleep with Smurfette or just take her for everything she had, which didn't look to be much, Dean thought, as he looked around the tiny room in the dawn's early light and sighed.

When his dad finally caught the yellow-eyed demon that had killed their mom...yeah, he'd read his dad's precious journal and figured out real quick that John Winchester wasn't a traveling salesman or selling anything at all... except maybe for a load of bullshit...but when his dad finally did kill it, and he had no doubt that he would, they would move back to Kansas where Sammy could go to a real school and his dad would open up the garage again and he would work along side him and they would be a normal family again...before it was too late.

Dean didn't mind so much that their life sucked ass at the moment, hell, most of the time but he knew Sammy did. He couldn't count the number times he'd heard his brother crying himself to sleep because they didn't have a mom or a nice house or toys and he knew his dad heard it too but never said anything, just ordered him to keep the gun loaded and to watch over his brother. And he'd done it, night after night, week after week, month after month and year after year and he would keep doing it because they were all he had left in the world and the last place he wanted to end up in was in juvie hall or foster care separated from his father and Sammy.

Looking over at his brother Dean smiled. Sam looked like a total goober with his mouth hanging open, drooling on the pillow and he wished he had something to stick in his brother's pie hole...like a plastic spoon or a live moth. But it was too cold for moths and the plastic spoons were in the glove box of the car, along with a nine-millimeter Glock, and he wondered what Jewels would think if she knew about all the guns and the other stuff. She'd probably freak out and tell them to get the hell out so he thought he'd better pee and see if there was anything in the kitchen to eat before they got the boot.

Rolling out of the bed his bare feet hit the cold floor and he whispered a curse. Sam continued to sleep but the dark circles still puddled under his eyelashes. It seemed to Dean like Sammy never got enough sleep and that he was always kind of sick. "Dude, someday you'll get to sleep in your own bed. I promise," Dean whispered as he pulled on his jeans and his genuine "Damaged Justice" Metallica tour shirt over his thermal underwear, the one he'd swiped from the Sports Arena in Toledo, Ohio a week or so before Thanksgiving. It was three sizes too big but Dean knew a guy couldn't be too picky when he crawled under a table and pulled a grab 'n' dash.

His dad had turned a blind eye to his latest acquisition like he always did because, if he bothered to ask, John Winchester just might have to set down some rules and boundaries for Dean and Sam both and Dean figured that if they had to stay on the road then he kinda like things just as they were...and the five or so songs he'd heard before slipping out of the arena and running back to Sammy at the motel had been totally kick ass.

As he made his way into the living room humming the melody from, as James Hetfield had called out, "For Whom The Fucking Bell Tolls" Dean saw that the couch was empty and that a blanket was neatly folded and laid over the arm. Oh, man, he thought, either Smurfette was a pushover or his dad had booked and, when he knelt on the couch and pulled the curtain aside, he saw that the Impala was gone and that John Winchester had indeed booked.


	5. Chapter 5

"Sammy," Dean said softly shaking Sam's arm, "Come on, you gotta get dressed." The younger boy's eyes fluttered open and immediately filled with fear. "It's okay," Dean reassured him, "We just gotta go. Dad says to meet him up town, you know, by the Christmas Shoppe."

At the mention of the gaily-decorated seasonal store Sam's eyes brightened and he smiled and whispered, "You think dad'll let us buy something?"

"_Fat chance, Sammy,"_ Dean thought but said, "Sure he will. It's almost Christmas. Just hurry up so we can be there when it opens."

Jewels always woke early promising herself an afternoon nap before she headed to The Ram, a nap that she had yet to take. Lying in her bed she wondered what she had in the house to feed her overnight guests and as she mentally inventoried her refrigerator she heard hushed voices and got up out of bed and put on an old plaid flannel bathrobe that had been her husband's.

When she walked into the living room she hadn't really expected to see John Winchester up yet but evidently he was also an early riser, as were his boys and, walking to the guest bedroom doorway, she saw Dean fully dressed and already in his jacket. He was bent over trying to tie his brother's shoe laces while repeatedly swatting away the five year old's hands as he tried to yank out the stray hairs from his brother's cowlick. Sam's backpack was on the bed next to a small mound of items she recognized as hers, nothing really of any value but sentimental.

"You do that again, Sammy," Dean warned him in a harsh whisper, "and I'm gonna tie your shoe laces together and use a double knot."

Giggling, Sam looked up and spotted Jewels standing in the doorway, a frown on her face. His own smile faded quickly and he became as still as death prompting Dean to sigh in exasperation. "She's standing right behind me, isn't she," he said standing up to face Sam who just nodded gravely and slipped down from the bed.

"Okay, Baby Face. You want to tell me what's going on here?" Jewels inquired calmly.

"Well, we were just going to meet our dad for breakfast. He said not to wake you up," Dean explained turning to face her. Knowing Sam couldn't lie to save his life he shoved him behind him and, when he tried to lean out to look at her, Dean shoved him back hopefully out of sight.

"And since I don't have a dog you thought my _stuff_ needed to go for a walk?" Jewels sat on the bed and picked up the backpack. A round glass ball with shining dots of gold, green and blue and string filaments throughout the center rolled out onto her lap. Still behind Dean, Sam smiled broadly and reached for the ball which she let him take from her hand. "You know that's glass don't you, honey, and not a bouncing ball?"

It seems Sam already knew as he just cradled it gently against his chest and asked, "Do you have a dog?"

Jewels laughed and Dean relaxed a little. At least 'honey' Sammy was out of the doghouse, typical, but he knew he was screwed when she laid the stink eye on him.

"Where's your father and don't lie to me," she said pointedly and Dean looked sullenly at her. She was relieved. This was the reaction she expected from a kid his age, not a smarmy smile and a song and dance. Still, he hesitated while trying to figure out if he should take a chance on her.

She'd been really cool up until now, Dean thought, but knew they could still end up in social services or maybe even in jail. As the silence grew Sam climbed back up onto the bed and sat next to Jewels and proceeded to give Dean his own version of the stink eye.

"_You were in on this, too, you little traitor. __You wanted that stupid ball," _he wanted to yell out but, awesome big brother that he was, he would take the fall instead and Jewels watched as a lone tear slipped from his beautiful green eyes.

She reached out and pulled him by his arm to sit on the other side of her. She took Sam's hand in her's because he would welcome the comfort where as Dean would more than likely take it as a sign of his failure and just stared at the print on the wall before them. An old, dark but quite beautiful etching by Gustave Dore titled _The_ _Angels Ithuriel and Zephon_ _Fly with Sword and Lance_…guardian angels. Jewels took a deep breath and decided to let it all go for the time being and asked, "Who's hungry?"

Both boys looked up at her.

"Do you have pancakes?" Sam lisped.

"Do you have pigs in a blanket?" Dean wanted to know.

"I might have some eggs and bread for French toast," she started then looked at Dean, "I do have eggs left, don't I?"

"Sure," he assured her, "What am I gonna do with a dozen eggs?"

"Egg my neighbor's house."

Dean mulled it over and asked, "Does he deserve it?"

Jewels knew it would only encourage him but she laughed in spite of herself and told him conspiratorially as they moved toward the kitchen, "Sometimes the old buzzard does."

The three of them sat at the tiny table in the tiny kitchen eating in companionable silence. Sam picked at his breakfast while Dean methodically ate piece after piece of the French toast she laid out before him. She'd seen it before, in the refugee camps outside of Saigon when they had gone out to offer what little help they could to the displaced villagers, the rail thin kids eating everything they could get their hands on for fear of going hungry the next day or for the next week. Though not quite orphans the two boys sitting at her table were defiantly nomads if not refugees. Jewels put down her fork and picked up her coffee cup, resting her elbows on the table, and asked nonchalantly, "So Dean, just how old are you?"

"I'll be ten in January and Sammy will be six next May."

"You guys on Christmas break?"

"Yep," he lied without missing a beat.

"Do you know where your dad went?" she then asked and he shook his head and pressed his hand to his belly, her questions unnerving him and threatening to turn an enjoyable meal into a bellyache.

"It's okay," she reassured him, "I'm not calling anyone...unless you want me to."

"I don't," Dean said fervently.

"Okay then, but...not even your mother?"

"She's dead." He said it with such detachment that Jewels wondered if she truly was or if he just didn't care and little Sam never looked away from the cartoons on the TV set.

"I'm sorry to hear that," Jewels said offering him sympathy.

Dean didn't seem to need it and told her simply, "It was a while ago...when Sammy was just a baby."

"Do you have any other relatives I could call?"

"All dead," Dean told her and tucked into a final piece of French toast.

One dead parent away from being an orphan and all alone in the world she thought sadly and asked cautiously, "Is your dad coming back?"

"Sure he is," Dean said ardently but with just a hint of uncertainty.

"Does he leave you with total strangers a lot?"

With his mouth full this time he said, "Not very often and only when he knows he can trust them."

"_How in the hell could he possible know that I'm trustworthy?"_ she wondered angrily...but somehow he had. Lucky for him she was as trustworthy as the day was long and she thought, "_Good read, Winchester."_

"Usually he just leaves us in a motel room by ourselves," Sam said adding his two cents to the conversation.

"And just where does he go when he leaves you by yourself?"

"You don't wanna know," Dean said quickly stabbing the last bite of his breakfast.

"I don't, huh?" she challenged.

Dean looked up from his clean plate and his eyes locked with hers and he said simply, "Nope."


	6. Chapter 6

John Winchester's fingers were so cold he felt like crying. Shaking uncontrollably with second stage hypothermia he still kept shoveling snow, methodically breaking through one hard, icy crust to hit light, fluffy powder only to encounter another layer of crystallized ice. And so it went, hour after hour, the hunter busting through a layer of fresh snow that had melted down a few inches only to be frozen over again hopefully preserving anything below it. On and on he dug through the icy layers that had been building on the pass since the snow had first started falling in early September.

The snowmobile he'd rented to climb to the top of the pass sat hidden among the tree and he prayed to God that it would start up again as, like a man possessed, he continued to removed the snow in great shovels full until he spotted the yellow police tape left behind after the suicide of Chief Master Sergeant Ross Downey, U.S.A.F., retired.

Posing as an insurance agent John had struck up a conversation with the town's deputy sheriff after following his police cruiser into the parking lot of the county court house. Tired but still personable after his graveyard shift Raymond DiAngelo had given him everything he needed to find the scene of the crime as it were. A crime without apparent motive other than a bad case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Transitioning from ditch digger to archaeologist John got down on his knees and began swiping away at the snow with his hands, slowly now, gently. Even as he slowed down his lungs continued to burn until he couldn't stand it a moment longer. He sat back on his haunches to rest and pulled off his gloves.

His fingers were ominously white and he couldn't feel the tips anymore but he shoved them back into his gloves, stiff with frozen moisture, and continued to dig, excavating a square area about ten feet by ten feet; the immediate area where CMSgt Downey's body had been found...what had been left of it. The death had been ruled a suicide and rightly so but John had his suspicions as to what had cause the highly decorated pararescue jumper to take his own life.

John noticed coyote tracks that hadn't been obliterated by the search party and subsequent coroner's investigative team, along with those of rabbits and crows dotting the site but only around the periphery as if they had been too cautious to approach the body and with good reason. Suddenly he found what he'd been looking for...a trail of blood red wolf tracks.

Easily overlooked by police officials in the midst of the other animal sign, these tracks were extremely unusual in that, number one; wolf sightings had been virtually unheard of since the last den of wild Colorado wolves had been wiped out in 1935 and number two; this wolf walked upright.


	7. Chapter 7

Jewels opted not to press Dean for more information and instead wondered what she could do with two young boys on a pisser-cold winter's day in laid back Georgetown, Colorado. She told them to dress warmly and to follow her out through the foot or so of snow that covered the back yard to the old wooden garage that sat behind the house. She reached down and gave the door handle a mighty yank and it rolled back on squeaking wheels and groaning springs and Dean burst into raucous laughter when he saw the car inside.

It was a 1971 bright orange Volkswagen Beetle with a crappy four-cylinder engine and a Mopar exhaust that Dean knew wouldn't help the little car get out of it's own way, especially pulling the steep grade up the Interstate that had even had the Impala groaning and he decided then and there that he wouldn't be caught dead in Smurfette's Smurf-Mobile. The car's only redeeming quality was the knobby, off road tires that had been studded through with bolts.

Jewels opened the car door, leaned in and turned the key. Nothing. Dean looked at Sam; a smug know-it-all look on his face, and Jewels just grimaced at him when he pointed out the obvious. "Your battery's dead, ya know."

"Is that so, smart guy?" She waited a few minutes, leaned in and cranked the engine again and it caught almost immediately. Dean's eyebrows shot up and Sam's eyes lit up when she added, "Ya just gotta have the touch. Now get in."

"Shotgun," Dean called out helping his brother into the back seat. He climbed into the seat next to Jewels while she let the little car warm up. When all was said and done, very little actual heat blew through the vents as she revved the engine blowing carbon monoxide throughout the garage. It was a dangerous game but she needed pretty good momentum to break through the small snow drift that had formed at the entrance to the garage.

Tromping her foot on the accelerator the Bug plowed through the drift but bogged down at the end of the driveway in the windrow left by the snowplow.

"Is this where we get out and shovel?" Dean asked her with a sigh.

"Shoveling's for flatlanders," she assured him and simply drove the car back toward the garage, turned right into her neighbor's side yard, then drove out his nicely shoveled driveway. They would have made a clean getaway except for the fact that her neighbor had been watching out his livingroom window and came running out his front door threatening to call the cops. Jewels turned to Dean and said with a wink, "Now we egg 'im."

Dean laughed, gave Jewels a high five and started to develop his first serious crush. Sam, his teeth rattling as the little car bounced over the ice rutted and potholed streets, looked out the window excitedly as the scenery flew by as they made their way out to the lake.

In the summer Georgetown Lake was full of sailboats, trout and all kinds of gunk from all the abandoned gold and silver mines in the area. In the winter it was frozen over and covered with jeeps and various other four wheeled drive vehicles all going head to head in single stage elimination races to see who would eventually come out on top and win bragging rights and free beer at the Ram. Only the brave dared to race with two wheel drive.

Dean could hear the other vehicles over the Volkswagen's noisy engine as they made their way down the frontage road. Coming over a rise he saw a number of cars pulled off to the side of the Interstate as well as lined up on the frontage road as spectators watched the cars out on the lake.

"Where are we gonna park?" Dean wondered aloud.

"Parking's for flatlanders," she told him and steered the Bug onto the ice and pulled into line to wait her turn.

"You're not seriously thinkin' of racing this thing are you? How's it gonna hold the corners?" Dean wanted to know, "The engine's in the back and its not even four wheel drive."

"Well, with all the weight in the back it sure as hell won't fishtail like that boat of your Dad's," she explained, "and the tires are studded with threaded bolts and besides, four wheel drive's..."

"I know, for flatlanders."

Jewels won her first heat with a local who worked at the Henderson Mine up on Berthoud Pass, then won her second over one of the bartenders at The Ram. Her third time up she was going against deputy sheriff Ray DiAngelo who apparently never slept. She pulled up next to the deputy's jeep to chat before they flipped a coin to see who started out on the far side of the lake. "Ready to get your ass whooped, Raymond?" she asked him.

"Hey, Jewels," Ray greeted her from behind black as night aviator shades, "Guess you're coming into some money."

"Why, you betting against me?" she asked with an incredulous laugh.

"Nah, just another insurance agent up at the ass crack of dawn asking me all kinds of questions about Ross," he told her and Jewels' stomach sank.

She had thought everything was all taken care of, all the loose ends tied up and, when Dean looked over at her and saw the frown on her face, he leaned over her to speak to the cop, "So Ray, what'd this guy look like?"

Taking off his sunglasses Ray stuck his head out the window and frowned, "Robbin' the cradle there aren't ya, Jewels?"

"Just answer the question, Barney," she replied, the smile back on her face.

"Good lookin' guy, 'bout six-two, brown hair, green eyes and a twelve o'clock shadow."

"Dad," Dean said under his breath and sat back in his seat.

"_So he was still in town_," she thought, "_and sticking his nose where it doesn't belong." _He was good, Jewels would give him that. Good enough to do an end run around her close friend Ray DiAngelo, a pretty hard feat to accomplish in such a tight knit community where everyone knew your business but was loath to share it with outsiders. Jewels decided to not let the information and her suspicions spoil their fun and looked back at Sam and asked, "You ready to go one more time, Sammy?"

He nodded smiling, "Then can we get lunch?"

"Sure thing, Sweetie."

"_Sweetie",_ Dean thought in disgust, "_They always like the baby, Sammy, best."_

She turned to Dean and his pursed lips and frown weren't lost on her. He had issues, either with Sammy or with his father or maybe even with her and she decided to cut him a break. "Hey Ray, I'm gonna bow out of this one."

"I knew it! I knew you were all show and no go!"

"Not so fast Officer Douche Bag," she told him, "My co-pilot's gonna take over." She undid her seatbelt and motioned for Dean to do the same. They crawled over one another swapping seats and, when they were belted in again, she asked, "You can drive a stick, can't you?"

With a huge cheesy smile on his face Dean answered, "Do werewolves crap in the woods?"


	8. Chapter 8

Standing at the window in Jewels' kitchen John Winchester watched the orange Volkswagen as it careened down the street and turned sharply; smashing through the pile of snow blocking the end of the driveway, then disappear from sight into the garage. He heard the car doors slam and his boys' raucous laughter as they spilled out of the garage and, never noticing him standing in the kitchen's doorway, Dean rushed in and quickly grabbed something out of the refrigerator then headed back outside slamming the back door.

He continued to watch as Jewels pulled a camera from her coat pocket and convinced the boys to stand beside the garage for a picture. Holding up her hand for them to wait a minute she ran to the garage and began to lower the door. John watched as the door hit the half way mark and she let it drop the rest of the way, the force of it smacking the concrete floor hard enough to loosen the layer of snow that had been perched precariously on the roof. It let go and slid nosily off of the shingles covering both Sam and Dean and John laughed aloud for the first time in a long while even as tears welled in his eyes and he said in a quavering whisper, "Damn you, Mary".

Blinking back his tears the hunter moved to the living room to watch as the trio ran out into the front yard. He watched solemnly as Sam laid back in the snow and made angel's wings with his arms while Dean and Jewels tried unsuccessfully to roll a halfway decent snowball in the hopes of building a snowman. The Champagne powder, while glorious to ski in, was a total bust for building snowmen or even the most rudimentary snow fort so Jewels gave up and laid back in the snow alongside Sam to make angels of her own.

Dean, forgetting he was too old and way too cool to make snow angels, dropped down beside her and the three of them lay together in the snow, their angel wing tips touching, watching as the first stars began to twinkle in the twilight sky. At that moment the Yellow Eyed demon must have been reveling in John's pain because it was so intense. The pain of loosing his wife, his dreams, his future and above all, as they grew older and he tried to protect them from the demon's evil, the inevitable loss of his sons' love and respect.

As darkness crept closer the trio rose up as one and stealthily made their way to the end of the neighboring driveway. John couldn't see what was happening but he heard the victorious shouts as Jewels, Dean and Sam ran back across the lawn and up the front steps bursting through the door. For everyone's safety he hadn't parked Impala anyway near the house and they had no idea that he was inside until they came face to face with him.

The boys became suddenly sullen and mute and, noting their reactions, Jewels paused for only a moment then said, "You should have come outside."

He knew it was true, that he should have joined them, joined in the fun but he would have felt like an intruder trying to push his way into the already tightly knit little group, something he could never have imagined when they'd placed each of his boy's in his arms at the hospital. John saw the way Jewels and his boys had bonded in the short amount of time they'd been together and no longer a man with the luxury of living for the moment he knew that when he was finished in Georgetown and they had to leave, Sam and Dean, Dean especially, would be good little soldiers and never let the pain show. They would simply go along with him, returning to the living nightmare that was now his life, something he would never, could never ask Jewels Downey to do. It was his fight and his fight alone and he had found that no one could help him and not die along the way.

"What were you guys doing out there?" John asked.

At the sound of his voice Sam, eager for any attention from his father, shrugged off his jacket and ran to hug him. John picked up his youngest and held on for dear life while Dean hung back and picked up Sam's jacket and his own intending to hang them in the foyer.

Jewels grabbed them away from him and chucked him on the arm and said, "Tell 'im."

Hesitating only briefly Dean took a deep breath and spilled it, "We were egging old man Naughton's mailbox."

John laughed aloud and sat down on the couch, Sam in his lap, and asked, "Not the house?"

"It was the best we could do with only two eggs," Jewels added as she watched father and sons from the foyer.

"He threatened to call the cops on us when Jewels drove across his lawn on the way to the ice races," Dean explained in defense of their actions.

Sam placed his small hands on either side of John's head and directed his face and his attention to him alone and added excitedly, "Jewels let Dean drive the bug."

Dammit Sammy! Now dad's gonna blow his top Dean thought but when his father only moved over to make room for Jewels on the couch and looked at Dean kindly, the boy said proudly, "Yeah, and I smoked a cop."

"Ray DiAngelo," Jewels said looking John squarely in the eye, "My very good friend."

"I'll explain it all later...if you'll listen," he said under his breath.

"I'm all ears," she told him nonchalantly.

Dean watched the exchange apprehensively and Jewels turned her attention back to him. "You can tell your dad all about it at dinner," she suggested, "After all, Deputy DB is paying."

"Deputy DB?" John quarried and was only mildly surprised when Sammy piped up excitedly.

"Deputy Douche Bag!"


	9. Chapter 9

The following night John was waiting for Jewels when she was finally able to leave The Ram, secure in the knowledge that the assistant bartender would see that the place didn't end up burned to the ground. After nursing a single beer all night and steadfastly refusing the obvious invitations of not one but all three of the waitresses John stood up when Jewels passed by and reached for her coat to help her on with it.

"Don't you go spoiling me with your big city ways, Winchester," she warned him as they stepped out into the bitter cold.

"Lawrence, Kansas...not really all that urbane," he assured her and took her arm as they walked down 6th to Taos.

They stopped at the corner and Jewels looked up at the sky. It was crystal clear and the nearly full moon shown so brightly that the stars seemed to shine and twinkle brighter than she'd ever seen them. "And some people say Texas is God's country," she said disdainfully then added, "And that the Cowboys are God's team...but then they haven't experienced a Colorado Rocky Mountain winter's night or seen the Bronco's play."

"They just lost back to back Superbowls," John reminded her painfully.

Jewels looked affronted but like a true fan said, "We'll get there just as soon as we get rid of Dorsett. Beware of Cowboys bearing gifts." They turned down Taos and walked a block in silence until Jewels spoke up once more. "You left the boys alone?" It was more of a statement than a question.

"They're safe," John assured her and not thinking added, "I left the Colt with Dean." As soon as he said it he wanted to bite off his tongue and for good reason.

"You'd better mean Colt 45 Malt Liquor because leaving beer with a kid is asinine enough but leaving a gun with one is just plain criminal," Jewel said quickening her step precipitously.

"I can explain it all if you'll just listen," he told her plaintively trying to keep up with her, "or if you'll just slow down."

She slowed up only fractionally to look at him when he came up beside her and he almost winced. If looks couldn't kill they certainly could make a man feel about two inches tall. "Jewels!" he said finally and grabbed onto her arm and pulled her to a stop, "Dean's been handling guns since he was Sam's age."

"And that's supposed to reassure me? You really are a dick head." Jewels Downey was mad now and burned like a house afire toward her little house leaving him behind once again.

He let her have some room and, like a faithful but hapless dog who would more than likely be getting hit with a rolled up newspaper before the night was over, he followed her into the house and directly into the guest bedroom. Both boys were sound asleep with no evidence of a firearm or any disturbance of any kind.

She turned on him, her long blonde hair flying and her blue eyes blazing, "Get it," she said in a harsh whisper and left the room.

John gently slid his hand under Dean's pillow and retrieved the nickel-plated Colt 45 then walked quietly from the room. Jewels was not in the living room so he surmised she had taken refuge in her bedroom and followed her there.

In spite of the gun she saw palmed in his right hand she hauled back and slapped him as hard as she could and he rocked back, eyes watering. Jewels wound up ready to slap him again but this time he grabbed her wrist and managed to kick the door shut with his boot. She tried to pull free and he pushed her forcefully onto the bed and demanded, "Jewels, listen to me." but instead of listening she kicked him in the knee.

The hunter spat out a harsh whispered curse and fell on her dropping the gun on the rug next to the bed well out of her reach. He knew she wouldn't scream and chance waking the boys but she bucked up with a grunt to try and dislodge him until he brought his full weight to bear and she was pinned.

Panting, she hissed out, "Get..Off...Of...Me." She shoved him for emphasis and he would have hopped right up right then and there but she would have immediately seen how wrestling around on a bed with beautiful and passionate woman had affected him. He could see she was passionate about life in general and, from the stinging in his cheek, he knew she was very passionate about his kids and he wondered pathetically if she could ever feel that way about him. Not forever but for maybe for just one night and he kissed her softly to find out.


	10. Chapter 10

Always a sucker for soft lips and whisker burn Jewels Downey rested in the crook of John Winchester's arm, her head on his shoulder, her fingers threading through the hair on his chest driving him to distraction. In the throes of passion he'd made promises to her. Promises she unapologetically extracted with sexual blackmail. A promise to_ never_ leave Dean alone with a gun in her house again, a promise to _always_ put the seat down and a promise to tell her why he'd come to Georgetown, an explanation he wasn't looking forward to giving.

He took a deep breath and began what he knew would be a tale to send her screaming into the night and not because it involved werewolves but because she would think he was stark raving mad. "Do you know a man named Jim Murphy?" he asked her.

She turned her face to look up at him. "The name doesn't ring a bell."

"He's a good friend of mine. In Nam we were attached to MACSOG and one day we found ourselves in the middle of a cluster fuck. I was pretty banged up and Jimmy, well he was just plain screwed if we didn't get help and get it fast. As we waited, bleeding all over the jungle, from out of nowhere comes the most beautiful sight, a HH-3 helicopter, Jolly Green Two Seven to be exact."

Jewels smiled. Having performed triage in the loading bays of countless Jolly Green Giants she was intimately familiar with the workhorse of the Viet Nam War including Two Seven. It was at the 95th Evac in Da Nang where she'd first met Airman 2nd Class Ross Downey.

John looked up at the ceiling and, momentarily back in the jungle, he also smiled. "Even though they were taking plenty of small arms fire Two Seven stayed with us and, after a minute or two, this crazy motherfucker comes zipping to ground on a wire. After patching up Jim and securing him into the Stokes litter the pararescueman signals overhead and the basket lifts off and within seconds Jimmy and the bird are gone."

Jewels took one of John's big hands in hers and gave it a squeeze, a silent signal for him to continue.

"So I'm still sitting there, my back against a rubber tree, bleeding like a stuck pig while the PJ checks me out. He uses up the rest of the supplies in his kit on me, including the morphine syrettes, but I still have a hole in me that's leaking like a sieve and, in lieu of any more real bandages, he has me chew ten or twelve sticks of gum while we wait for the dustoff chopper to return. I'm so doped up I'm biting the inside of my mouth all to hell and he laughingly tells me to spit the wad of gum into his hand, then proceeds to shove it into the bullet hole in my side and damned if the blood doesn't slows to a trickle."

"Just like plugging a dike," he says and I can't help but laugh in spite of the pain." Pausing again John looked down at Jewels and saw the serene smile on her face as she listened so he continued.

"The next thing I know the wire's on its way back down and this seriously crazy PJ straps himself and me into a double harness and we take off out of there, skimming the tree tops all the way to the forward most LZ. Later I asked him if he was afraid of getting my wound infected if _he_ chewed the gum and he told me no. He just didn't particularly like spearmint."

Jewels laughed softly, "That's was so him, so crazy brave, so crazy sweet...but in the end just so crazy. And I bet your wound got infected anyway."

"Like crazy. You wanna see my scar?"

She elbowed him in the ribs, "Now tell me something I don't know about my husband, like why he never mentioned you or your friend."

"I never saw him again after that day. I went to Saigon and he went back to doing what he did. Thanks to your husband, Jim Murphy made it and is a pastor now. Has a church in Blue Earth, Minnesota and a hobby of sorts. He hunts…we hunt…things."

"Things?"

"Supernatural things. Father Jim asked me to come here, to make it right, to kill the thing that went after your husband."

"The 'thing'," she repeated.

"The werewolf."

As befit a combat nurse Jewels didn't threaten to call the police or run from the room or have him committed. She stayed relatively calm and told him, "And all this time I thought he was cheating on me with my boss." She got up out of the bed and crossed the room to the closet and took a battered day timer from the shelf and tossed it on the bed. "Ray found this on the ground beside his body and gave it to me. Said Ross was a good man and he didn't want anyone else getting their hands on it. Take it," she urged him, "and kill the bitch"


	11. Chapter 11

Dean watched as the brightly colored ball Sam was so fond of twisted in the early morning sunlight that streamed through the bedroom window throwing splotches of color everywhere...like a really lame disco ball. He just wanted to go back to sleep but the sparkling glass ball's slow rotation in the drafty room made it impossible. He looked at the calendar on the wall and frowned. It was December 23rd…again…and the closer it got to Christmas the more he dreaded waking up in the morning.

He didn't care that there was no tree and never any toys but Sammy still believed in Santa Clause because he was a dumb baby and it made him feel crappy to have to tell him that Dad really did care but that his job kept them on the move so much that Santa had a hard time finding them. It was true about the job but he doubted very much whether his dad really did give a shit.

After his mother had died John Winchester had missed most of Dean's Christmases and all of Sammy's and, after awhile, Dean had begun to think that his father did it on purpose just so he wouldn't have to hear Sammy crying or see his sad eyes. He did at least try to make sure they had something to eat and a warm place to stay over the holidays so he wasn't a total bastard, Dean thought, and this year, if they were lucky, maybe his dad wouldn't do anything to make Jewels mad at him until after Christmas so Sammy could at least have a tree.

As he crawled out of the bed and pulled on his clothes he considered going through his father's pockets to possibly scrape up enough money to buy Sam a candy cane at least but knew it would be useless. He'd seen the box of silver bullets high up on the mantel and knew they cost an arm and a leg so his dad was more than likely tapped out…again.

Already in a sour mood Dean's morning went from bad to worse when he went into the living room and found his dad's coat lying on the couch and the blanket still folded up where it had been yesterday. He made his way quietly to Jewels closed bedroom door and slowly twisted the knob and pushed it open. He saw her right away; all skinny with white arms and gold colored hair lying next to his dad, all muscles, dark and hairy and without thinking he said nastily out loud, "Pushover."

For a moment he thought no one had heard him but Jewels, always a light sleeper, had heard the squeaking floors as he made his way to the living room then back to her room and, when her eyes opened, Dean knew he was a gonner. But instead of backing out of the room and slinking away he stood his ground and glared at her.

Gently Jewels pulled the comforter up to cover John's bare shoulders, grabbed her robe and deftly slipped it on. She eased herself from the bed and shooed Dean out the door with only a look and closed it behind her. Herding him into the kitchen she flipped on the coffee maker and grabbed two mugs and set them on the table where Dean had sullenly taken a seat.

"Pushover, huh?" she commented and sat down across the table from him.

He looked at her defiantly and said, "Well, duh. You…my dad."

"Does that bother you?" she asked him earnestly.

His eyes opened a little wider. Since when did a grown up care what he thought? "Why should you care? My dad always does what he wants."

"Has he talked to you about girls yet? About the birds and the bees."

Dean snorted and told her, "Yeah, and about the poltergeists and the phantoms and the ghosts and the witches and the demons and the hellhounds..."

"Okay, okay. So you know about girls… and a lot of other stuff…but I just want you to know that if it bothers you, you know, me and your dad…in the same bed…I'll put his butt right back out on the couch."

"Yeah, sure," Dean said skeptically.

"I mean it. I don't much like being called a pushover. It's kind of harsh," she told him as she poured a mug of hot coffee for herself and a cup, with more milk than coffee, for him.

He took the mug and told her contritely, "Well, I didn't really mean it. It's just that my dad's a good-looking dude and women are always trying to get with him. Sometimes they try to make friends with me or Sammy…"

"Do you think that's why I made friends with you?"

"I was hopin' it was 'cause you liked us."

"Damn straight, Winchester. I liked you and Sam right off the bat. It took me a whole lot longer to warm up to your dad."

Dean was shocked by her revelation and asked "But you like him now."

"Yeah, I do," she said with a smile.

Dean knew it was true when he saw the dopey look on her face and mulled it over. He liked Jewels a whole lot and thought it best to warn her. "He's gonna leave you, ya know?" he said prophetically and with a hint of sadness.

"I know he is," she answered and hoped he couldn't hear the sadness in her voice.

The two of them sat and drank their coffee in silence until Dean broached another subject. "Do you think old man Naughton will pay me to scrub the eggs off his mailbox? I wanna buy Sammy something for Christmas…from Santa."

Jewels looked at the boy sitting across from her and thought "if I were twenty five years younger" but then realized she would be nine and, instead of admiring Dean Winchester for his selfless love and sacrifice for his little brother, she would probably think he had cooties. But she knew, that in spite of everything he'd been through and with everything his father laid on him, Dean Winchester would grow up to be an extraordinary young man.

"I think I might have some odd jobs you can do at The Ram but you gotta promise me you won't tell anyone. We have laws in this state about child labor."

"Not a problem," Dean assured her with a smile, relieved that Sammy would at least be getting a visit from Santa. He wouldn't count on his dad being there though; Christmas was still two days away.


	12. Chapter 12

Ross Downey's journal told John a lot about the former pararescueman. It told him that he loved hunting, the wilderness and seclusion. That he was a passionate man and loved God and country and, above all, his wife. He loved her steadfastly through all the ups and the downs, through the separations of which there were many and, rather than drag her into the latest shit storm he found himself in, he had cut himself off completely from her knowing full well that she would never take him back nor could he ever go back.

Ross' first realization that werewolves really did exist came almost two years before in the wilds of Canada when a dream trip had turned into a living nightmare. A guided black bear hunt for him and four army buddies had turned into a guided trip to hell with only a single survivor. It had taken him months to regain his strength and to make his way back to Colorado but he had done it with the help of soldiers of a different kind. Soldiers who called themselves hunters.

Returning to live alone in a cabin high on Guanella Pass he thought he was safe but one night when the moon was at it fullest the mournful wail of a lone she wolf shredded his sleep and threatened to shred his sanity as he was forced to relive the past.

The hunting trip had started out with four of his close friends and three guides, two men and one woman. Though skeptical at first of the lone female who, instead of being the camp 'bitch' cooking and tending fire, was in fact the lead guide, they relented and she took them deep into what they had all believed to be bear country. Where she had actually taken them was directly to a pack of lycanthropes, mythological humans with the ability to shape shift to wolves. In this case myth had become reality and his buddies and the two other guides had become wolf chow.

Saving him for herself, the one remaining guide had forced him deeper into the woods, chasing him at her leisure until he couldn't run anymore. Lungs near to bursting Ross lay on the ground clutching the large, ornate, silver, Vietnamese cross he'd worn every day since evac-ing several nuns and orphans from a Catholic church in Quang Tri Province in his hands. The crucifix offered him comfort in his last minutes as his thoughts turned to Jewels and, to his surprise, it had also offered him a reprieve from death when he slammed it hard into the wolf's gut as she stood over him sniffing him with hot, fetid breath as if he were a lamb chop.

On the hunt for a mate, he now knew that the female wouldn't have killed him only bitten him to pass on the 'virus' and the curse where, once in a Blue Moon or a Wolf Moon or a Snow Moon or a Worm Moon or any and all of the subsequent moons for all of eternity, he'd turn into a werewolf.

As the wolf lay severely but not mortally wounded, the cross jutting from her abdomen, Ross headed immediately back to the camp where he quickly buried what was left of his friends, and, taking as much of the equipment and supplies as he could carry, made his way south crossing the border into the US. Loosing count of the days on the run he finally stopped to take refuge in a small church in Blue Earth, Minnesota. There he had run into Jim Murphy, one of the many men he'd saved during the war.

A survivor from the war in Viet Nam and the war against evil, Father Jim had told him that in all likelihood the she-wolf would follow him to the ends of the earth and quite possibly beyond to finish what she'd started. Armed with that bit of knowledge and everything else Father Jim knew about the beasts, plus a good supply of silver bullets, he headed back to Colorado to prepare for the inevitable showdown.

The journal ended abruptly and John knew that the she-wolf had indeed caught up to the pararescueman and had delivered the fateful bite and, instead of living with the horror, Ross Downey had opted to blow his brains out sending her into such a frenzy that she'd torn the body to pieces.

The original disappearances that had led John Winchester to Colorado in the first place had all been in Grant, a small town on the opposite side of the pass, but all signs indicated that a werewolf was still in the area and, when John had turned up no plausible suspects there, he figured the bitch didn't shit where she ate so he had moved on to Georgetown.

Now with only a day until the full moon he stopped by the Red Ram to check up on Jewels and to see if anyone new had shown up in town after the influx of avalanche detourees had emptied out. Walking into the bar's office and expecting to see Jewels sitting at the messy desk he was taken aback when a dark haired beauty looked up at him and smiled.

"Can I help you?" the woman asked in a sultry voice.

As he breathed in her subtle but expensive fragrance John felt as if he'd been kicked in the groin but recovered adroitly and asked where he could find Jewels.

The brunette stood up and rounded the desk to stand in front of it and told him, "I've given her a few days off...until after the holidays. She's taken in some foundlings...that look suspiciously like you."

"My boys, Sam and Dean."

So this was Jewels' new friend, she thought, tall, dark, extremely well built and handsome enough to be nothing but trouble.

So this was Jewels' boss, he thought, tall, dark, extremely well built and beautiful enough to be nothing but trouble. Actually shaking his head like a befuddled cartoon character, he finally said "I'm John Winchester," and stuck out his hand.

She took his pro offered hand and shook it, "I'm Maridianna but please, call me Mari."

She waited for him to offer something else in the way of conversation and, when he realized he was just staring stupidly, he had the good grace to blush and stammered, "They've probably gone home... to her place I mean...so I guess I'll catch up with them there."

Mari just smiled as he continued to stand there like an idiot until finally, awkwardly, he took his leave. She continued to smile as she came out of her office and, watching his broad back as he left the bar, whispered huskily, "Like shooting fish in a barrel."

John walked down Taos Street and wondered why, when Jewels sat in the very same office, it didn't feel as if he was the hapless fly stepping into the spider's parlor. He also wondered if Mari could be the she bitch he'd been looking for all along.


	13. Chapter 13

Even before the tiny house came into view John heard his two boys shouting and the closer he got he realized they were playing baseball in the snow on the front yard. Jewels, crouched low over home plate, a round Volkswagen hubcap, held to an "I mean business" batting stance and waited for the pitch.

"Swing battah battah battah," Sam shouted, parroting his big brother, from his position a few feet behind Dean in what was the shortest outfield in the history of baseball.

Dean, an old oven mitt on one hand, wound up to pitch a large round object and, following through like Jewels had shown him, let it fly. She took a mighty swing with her bat and hit the ball dead on and it exploded into a million pieces showering apple all over the pitcher's mound and the outfield.

She took off at a dead run cutting by the pitcher's mound to shove Dean, who was yelling for Sam to scoop up some of the mess and tag her, into the snow then headed for the only base, a large pine tree near the street, only to be cut off by Sam with a fist full of apple pieces clutched in his mittened hand.

He reached out to tag her and she easily skirted around him, tagged the base and headed back to home plate. Sam went after her again as she passed by and she fell exaggeratedly and shouted, "You missed me, fielder."

"Did not!" Sammy shouted and, kneeling down beside, her rubbed the apple mush in her face and declared her out.

Laughing, she lifted a booted foot and gently shoved him over and he laid, cheeks rosy red and smiling happily, in the freshly fallen snow.

"Jewels! Fire!" Dean called and the three of them jumped up and ran into the back yard unaware of John as he watched from the street corner.

As he headed down the driveway John noticed enough apple pieces to make at least a half a dozen pies, an empty produce box from the Ram and realized the game had gone on for quite a while before he'd arrived. He was suddenly sorry he'd missed it and could only imagine what "Fire" meant in the crazy world of the Three Amigos as they headed whooping and hollering into the back yard. He found out when he walked between the house and the garage and saw smoke coming from an old grill Jewels had pulled from the garage.

Dean stood, his oven mitt pitcher's glove wrapped around a long handled fork, turning hotdogs while Jewels tended to buns on four paper plates balanced on the foot of snow that stood atop an ancient picnic table. Sam filled plastic cups with snow and poured kool-aid over them in an effort to make extremely sloppy snow cones.

Sammy spotted John first and the hunter was hard pressed to keep his emotions in check when both boys rushed overt to welcome him to dinner. Dean filled the buns and Sam brought a plate to his father and held it out tentatively.

"How'd you know I had a hankering for hot dogs?" John asked ruffling his youngest son's hair and, checking out the mostly blackened meat, told Dean, "And they're just the way I like 'em."

"He always says that," Dean told Jewels holding up his bun, "Even when they're more disgusting than this."

Jewels gave John and his sons room to bond and thoughtfully chewed her food as she watched them interact.

Dean turned to make sure that she was still there and, making sure he was the only one who could see her, Jewels opened her mouth wide.

"Ewe, gross!" he laughed not quite believing an adult would do such a thing but she offered no apology, only another shot of chewed up hotdog.

Later that night Jewels offered no apologies as she lay with John in her big antique bed and pressed him for details on what he was planning to do.

Based on the information he had, which was not much more then when he'd arrived, it wasn't much of a plan. "How much do you know about your boss?" he asked stroking her hair absently.

Jewels thought for a moment and was surprised at how very little she knew about Mari. They never socialized outside of work and Jewels had never been to the big house on the outskirts of town. "Not much, I'm afraid. She bought the bar a little over a year ago, the same time she built that big ass house of hers."

John knew the house. It was hard to miss and stuck out like a contemporary sore thumb in the quaint Victorian town. A snappy little black Ferrari sat in one of the garage bays completely winterized while a black Range Rover, when not in the lot behind the bar where the Impala was now parked, sat in the circular driveway.

"She pays more than anyone else in the county and she lets me do my job, never interferes in the day to day bullshit."

"In other words, she lets you be the queen."

"Yeah", Jewels smiled, "and it's good to be the queen."

They didn't speak for a while and then, out of the blue, he asked her, "What are you doing up here in the mountains?"

Jewels was quiet for long moments before she answered. "Hiding I guess," she said truthfully, "Even before you walked into the bar I knew all about evil. The inherent evil and pain and suffering of war so when I finally got back to the World I wanted to get as far away from death as I possible could. I never wanted to decide who got first crack at a surgeon and who was too wounded to survive the night ever again. I don't envy God his job."

"So you tend bar," he said quietly, "That's quite a stretch."

"Not really if you think about it. I just traded nursing for whiskey psychiatry. Everyone wants to tell the bartender his or her life's story," she said then added when she suspected he wanted to tell her more than she wanted to know at this point, "Don't even begin, Winchester. I only want _you_ for your body."

John laughed and thought that Jewels Downey was a most unusual woman. In spite of life's suckier moments she was truly loving and giving and the most irreverent woman he'd ever met. She was someone who would tell it like it was and, taking his chances, he asked, "How bad a father am I?"

Wow, where did that come from? she wondered but thought she owed it to him to shoot straight. "Well, you're about a ten on the "life sucks so deal with it" scale."

"That hard on 'em?" he asked rhetorically.

"Why do you do what you do and why in God's name do you drag them along with you?"

John wished he could tell her but the less she knew about him and his plans the less the yellow eyed demon would be interested in her if he ever connecter the two of them. "Just trust me when I say that it's for the best but that God doesn't have anything to do with it."

She had to accept his cryptic non-answer because she had no claim on him. Even though she adored his kids she wasn't ready to put herself out there any more than she already had and risk adding his inner demons to her own.

When she didn't press him any further and only sighed John turned to her and kissed her. "I need to go out tomorrow night but when I get back I'll take you out to dinner," he told her and added, "You think you can chew with your mouth closed?"

"You saw that, huh?"

"I don't miss much."

Except damn near everything where it concerns your boys, she thought, and wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled. "And if you don't..." she started to say, "come back" but he cut her off.

"Dean knows what to do, who to call," he finished and she wanted to scream.

She could hear the phone call now. "Hi, my name's Dean Winchester and a werewolf just gutted my dad and I need to make funeral arrangements. Oh, yeah, and I'm nine years old."


	14. Chapter 14

Maridiana loved to sit out on the wraparound deck that covered the entire width of the front of her home. It afforded her a clear view of the town and anyone approaching for miles around and she felt safe knowing that the only way to breech her outdoor sanctuary was through her bedroom or to climb one of the huge support beams holding it up.

Conversely, the only way down was either through her bedroom or over the railing and she had no compunction about tossing an unwanted visitor off the deck like so much trash. It had never come to that because only the invited came, willing and docile, like lambs to the slaughter and, although she hadn't had the opportunity to invite him yet, she wasn't surprised to see the black Impala drive up the driveway nor was she surprised when, a short while later, John Winchester stood in her bedroom doorway. By no means docile or weak he had, however, come willingly.

"Join me, please. I'm just enjoying the moon," she said indicating the chair across from hers at a small wrought iron table with a gloved hand, her breath frosted white in the crisp night air.

The deck, freshly shoveled and swept clean buy her only help, a combination butler and grounds keeper, was bathed only in moonlight. It was an inordinately bright moon and John made his way easily to sit opposite her, a decanted bottle of 1985 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and two wine glasses on the table between them as if she'd expected him. "Beautiful home," he told her pouring for them and offering her one of the glasses.

"I guess I need to install a better security system," she said smiling and reached out for the glass, "or draw and quarter my caretaker."

John took her gloved hand in his for a moment to take a look at the wrap she wore to protect her from the frigid night air and said, "Beautiful coat."

She was snuggled in a full-length fur coat with matching headband to protect her ears and matching boots to keep her feet warm. The thick white pelts showcased her stunningly dark beauty. "Thank you," she said as he let go of her hand and took the pro offered glass from him, "It's arctic wolf."

Taking a drink of the wine he kept his face passive and inhaled deeply, her perfume, as well as the wine, going straight to his head. Mari was a classic beauty with long, straight, coal black hair and startling dark blue eyes and, as he continued to study her serene face, he found no sign of lycanthropy or of impending transmogrification.

Her eyebrows were perfectly arched, her nose, small and aristocratic and, from what her could tell by the shape of her hands hidden in the warm leather gloves, her fingernails looked to be straight and, he would hazard to guess, perfectly manicured. She looked to be human but the only way he could be sure she didn't have bristles under her tongue was to kiss her and the urge to do just that was suddenly overwhelming.

He stood and extended his hand to her and, quirking a dark eyebrow, she let him help her to her feet. He then tugged the headband from her hair and threaded the fingers of his right hand through the fragrant, silky strands and pulled their joined hands behind him forcing her up close to him.

Mari came willingly, her mouth hungry for a taste of his sensual lips and they kissed in the moonlight. His tongue searched her mouth and found only a yielding tongue and wine scented breath and, instead of pulling away to end the kiss, he kissed her deeper all the while moving her from the porch to the bedroom, kicking the door closed behind them.

A fire burned in the sitting area of the spacious bedroom suite and a fire burned deep in his gut but Mari broke the marathon kiss and took a step back. John took a step forward to close the gap again but she pushed him away giving herself just enough room to slip off the fur boots and to unbuckle the diamond encrusted belt on her coat.

The satin lining allowed the coat to slip easily from her shapely shoulders and puddle luxuriously around her feet. Underneath, Mari was as naked as the day she was born and John sucked breath nosily into his lungs while all thoughts of werewolves, incredibly hot blonde bartenders and even his own kids were suddenly and completely wiped away. Gone completely until the sun rose and burst over the horizon, its golden rays streaming through the tall windows of the big house on the hill.

Deep in the arms of Morpheus, John Winchester continued to slumber, his dreams dark and disturbing. A raven swooped in and landed to perch on the deck's railing pacing back and forth agitatedly, cawing repeatedly before hopping to the deck where it began to peck at the dead rabbit that lay frozen to the redwood planks.

The bird's incessant tapping and intermittent cawing pulled John from his dreams and back to reality and the night before came rushing back. He kept his eyes closed and, though he could smell her perfume, he couldn't feel her heat or hear her breathing next to him. Finally he opened his eyes and took a quick furtive look around and sighed. Thankfully Mari was nowhere to be seen and he was suddenly steeped in 'morning after' remorse and knew, if she had been there, she would read it on his face and in his eyes.

The hunter had come to her in the middle of the night to find out if she was a werewolf and, finding no overt signs, he'd evidently lost his mind. In his insanity he'd then decided to find out if she was a mink...or if she just fucked like one…and now, sitting up in the huge bed with its disheveled designer bedding, he covered his face with his hands and cursed himself for his obvious weak will and general stupidity. He was in town to do a job and, although Mari was most likely "the job", he felt disgusted that he had actually "done" the job.

The damage was done and he could only hope to keep the repercussions to a minimum, not because there was any future for him and Jewels or for him and any other woman for that matter, but because Jewels Downey was a wonderful woman and deserved better than to have this get back to her.

The events of last night would go to his grave with him and he would let Mari know that it was simply a one-night stand and a huge mistake. She would probably just laugh at the suggestion that it was anything but and send him packing like she would any of the other lovesick puppies she picked up in her bar. As he hurriedly dressed he noticed an expensive, heavily perfumed parchment note resting against the bathroom mirror. She had left it for him, written in a delicate hand, and it read simply "See You Tonight."

"You can count on it," he said aloud and the damnable part of it all was that, even now, he couldn't be one hundred percent sure that she wasn't a werewolf because some lycanthropes showed no signs of the "illness" except for that one night when the moon was at its fullest. So tonight he would pack up what gear he needed, head up the pass and put himself out there as bait and wait to see who or what bit.


	15. Chapter 15

December 24th started early in the little house on Taos Street. Jewels, awake and alone in her bed, sat with her back propped against a pillow drinking coffee. Like her husband before him John Winchester hadn't a prayer of sneaking out of the house, let alone out of the actual bed in which she slept, without her waking. He had left at 2:00 in the morning and had come back shortly after dawn but instead of sneaking back into her bed he had racked out on the couch for whatever reason.

Jewels had gone to check on him and he looked exhausted. He hadn't taken off his jacket or his boots and had not even stirred when she tried to wake him. Wherever he had been and whatever he had been doing he looked to be okay so she had returned to bed with coffee in hand.

"You kick 'im out?" Dean asked leaning against the jam with a look of trepidation on his face.

Patting the bed beside her she assured him, "Nah, we're still good," and made sure there was plenty of room for him as he scrambled onto the bed.

He propped up the other pillow and mimicking her leaned back against the headboard then asked, "What, no coffee?"

Jewels snorted and handed him her half empty mug."How long you been drinking coffee, anyway?"

He took a sip and told her, "All my life,"

"That long, huh? You know it'll stunt your growth."

"Then we should be giving this to Sammy. He'd be the biggest kid in his class...if he went to school."

"How about you?"

"I'm average height," he told her between sips of the strong brew, "but definitely the toughest."

"You a bully?"

His head turned and he shot her a mean glare to cover the hurt he felt that she would even think such a thing about him. "Not hardly," he said haughtily, "I always stick up for the little runts and the freaks in the crappy schools we go to even though it sucks beyond words to be the new kid all the time. There's always some dildo trying to prove how tough he is by beating the crap out of ya."

Dean put the mug to his lips to take another sip and she lifted the bottom of the cup up to give him a coffee mustache. He sighed exasperatedly and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt. Here he was trying to seriously defend his honor and she just wanted to do things to make him laugh and, by God, he couldn't help it and he laughed out loud.

"It must be hard, having to fight to be accepted by the other kids, to have to fight to sit in a classroom and be bored out of your gourd."

Jewels gets it, Dean thought, she really gets it. "I don't care anymore if they like me or not 'cause I know what's gonna happen to 'em if they're not real careful. And why do I need to know what the capital of Boston is when I know that if you say "Bloody Mary" three time into a mirror you're gonna die?"

"Point taken," she told him then couldn't resist, "and Boston's the capital of Massachusetts."

"Okay, whatever, but I bet those suckers up in Boston don't know that they didn't get any of the real Salem witches, not a one. They weren't stupid enough to get caught by those church Bozos."

"You got a problem with church, too?" she asked turning toward him.

Dean quietly mulled over her question for a moment or two then told her, "My Mom used to tell me about God and his Angels and how they would take care of me and Sammy and dad and her but someone must have lied to her because she's dead and when my dad gets hurt, **_I _**gotta take care of him...and Sammy, too."

And who takes care of you, my fierce little angel? she wanted to know but asked instead, "Would you like your dad to stop what he's doing?"

He turned and looked at her as if she'd just gotten off the short bus. "'course, I would. Then we could stay in one place, that I hope doesn't suck out loud, and he could open up his garage again and I wouldn't have to lie whenever some nosy teacher asks me what my dad does for a living."

"What if he can't stop? Would you boys be okay living in one place, that doesn't suck out loud, without him?"

Resting his coffee mug on his lap Dean didn't hesitate for a second and said without anger or rancor, "Dad can't leave Sammy unprotected and when he's not around he needs me to watch over him. The bad stuff's got something to do with Sammy."


	16. Chapter 16

Jewels shook her head and wondered what "bad" could possibly be connected to sweet, innocent, five year old Sam Winchester. She tried to decide if she should press Dean for more information on his bombshell when Sam came shuffling sleepily into the room.

"Well, speak of the devi..," she began and, seeing Dean's grimace, quickly finished, "lishly handsome Sam Winchester. Come on up here, kiddo." Sam crawled up onto the bed and settled himself between her and his brother and lay back on half of her pillow.

Dean punched him in the arm and drew a line down the bedspread with his finger, effectively dividing up the space between them, a ritual as old as Sam was. "Here's the line, doofus...now don't cross it."

Sam seemed to accept the rules of bed sharing and the nickname unquestionably and simply scooted closer to Jewels.

"I suppose you want coffee, too?" she said to the five year old.

Sam looked up at her and wrinkled his nose with distaste and shook his head vehemently. He then smiled and asked her, "Are you gonna be my new mommy?"

Out of the mouth of babes, she thought, and wrapped her arm around his shoulder. "No, Sammy," she said truthfully then softened the blow a bit by adding, "I'd rather be your dad's crazy friend. You know...the one who lets you drink beer and smoke cigarettes whenever you come over."

Sam looked up at her with another grimace while Dean exclaimed, "Awesome!"

She leaned forward and reached over Sam's head to shove Dean over sideways. "You are soooooooo easy, Winchester," she told him with a laugh.

Dean sat back up laughing, too. "I knew **_that_** was too good to be true," he said and actually felt a little disappointed. Not because she wouldn't let them drink and smoke, which he knew she never would, but because any day now they would have to go and she would probably forget all about them.

Seeing the change in his demeanor Jewels hooked her foot under Sam's leg and lifted it across the invisible line Dean had drawn in the proverbial sand onto his territory.

"Eeewww! Back off, dork face," Dean said and shoved the offending appendage back onto Sam's side.

Jewels bent down and whispered in Sam's ears and smiling he moved an inch or two closer to his brother with Jewels quickly filling in the gap between them. They lay quietly for another few moments more then Jewels nudged Sam and he moved directly next to his brother.

Dean quickly moved away from the approaching bag of cooties that was his brother and, not realizing he was running out of room, fell off of the bed and onto the floor. He jumped up and rubbed his backside and, while Sam and Jewels laughed uproariously, quickly got back on the bed, this time on the other side. The three of them settled back in, Jewels between them, her arms wrapped around them both.

At that moment John walked into the room and his breath caught in his throat and his heart wrenched painfully. Before his sons could see the tears in his eyes the hunter turned and made his way back into the living room and sat heavily on the couch and hung his head.

At his father's sudden departure Sam started to whimper and Dean tried to get up but Jewels soothed the younger child and ordered the older one to stay put while she followed the father. "You okay?" she asked and knew he wasn't when he looked up and she saw the tears. She sat next to him and put a comforting arm around his broad shoulders and, spying Dean in the hallway, shooed him reluctantly back to her room with a pleading stink eye.

"You look so much like her," was all John could say and lowered his head again.

"I know it's not fair," Jewels conceded, "She should be lying in bed hugging your boys, not me. How you must miss her."

"I miss her a lot," he started then took a deep breath, "When I don't hate her for what she did to us."

Jewels began to chant her mantra "no good deed going unpunished" but hearing him sigh she stopped and laid her head on his shoulder. She knew that meeting the Winchesters hadn't been a chance occurrence because she didn't believe in chance, only in fate, and her time spent with them had brightened up her dreary existence and opened up her mind to the fact that there were more vile entities and more profound evil out there than she could have ever imagined. Knowledge that could save her life and the lives of her loved ones but that she would have rather have gone to her grave not knowing.

Waiting inside Jewels' bedroom for as long as he could Dean crept back down the hallway and stared at his dad's face as he sat next to her. He looked like death warmed over and so sad that it scared him and he silently pleaded for Jewels to do something to make his father laugh.

John noticed him for the first time and held out his hand to his son. Reluctantly Dean crossed the room to stand in front of him. Jewels looked on in silence until she saw Sammy heading their way. She got up and scooped him up and took him to the guestroom where she could get him dressed and they could watch the swirling glass ball together.

John appreciated Jewels diverting Sam's attention but wished she would come back so he wouldn't have to face his eldest son, who stood stiffly, lips pressed together, hands clenched into fists, alone. Dean looked so much like Mary that it was hard for him to look into his eyes, once trusting and kind like hers, now filled with suspicion and much too hard for someone his age.

He regretted the way they had to live, the burden he had put on Dean from such an early age, but it was the best he could do until he killed the yellow-eyed demon and his youngest son was safe. So he would keep searching out and destroying evil where he found it until the day he either triumphed or the day he died all the while trusting strangers like Jewels Downey to help him along the way.

Dean's stomach was clenched as tightly as his fists and the pain he always felt when he knew his dad was going to go ballistic..or away...started deep down inside of him. His chin trembled ever so slightly but he wouldn't cry because he knew his dad hated crying and neither he nor Sam cried in front of him anymore. Hell, he never cried anymore period and wasn't about to start up again just because he was scared. Used to seeing his dad come home pretty banged up after fighting whatever slimeball thing he'd been chasing he'd never seen him look so tired before and suggested, "Dad, let me go with you tonight."

Surprised that his son knew him so well John shook his head trying to clear the fog that threatened to envelope his brain and placed his hand on Dean's shoulder. "You know I can't take you with me. I need you to…"

"Take care of Sammy," Dean finished with a sigh, "I know the drill but Jewels is here. She can watch him and…"

"Dean, no!" John barked and watched as his son's mouth snapped shut immediately. Regretting the sharpness of his words he added, "Jewels needs protection, too."

Mulling this new twist over in his mind Dean relaxed a little and nodded, "Yeah, she is just a girl."

"That's right and she doesn't know what to expect, what to watch out for."

"But she won't let me have a gun," Dean pointed out.

"I know but I left her one and she at least knows how to shoot it. She was in the army."

"Jewels was in the Army?"

"Yeah, but she was only a nurse so cut her some slack and make sure she doesn't hurt herself, okay?"

Dean smiled at the trust his father was placing in him to keep Sammy and Jewels safe and felt a little better about his leaving…except that it was Christmas Eve. "Do you have to go? It's Christmas Eve and Sammy, well, you know how kids are, he still believes in Santa Claus."

His son's plaintive words cut him like a knife but Fate had designated that night's moon as the Cold Moon and, for his very survival, he froze his heart against his son's request. He stood up and grabbed the duffel bag next to the door. "You know I love you and Sammy."

Dean knew that in his own way his father did love them but, since his mom had died, his dad didn't show it anymore. It was like his mom had taken all of John Winchester's love with her, leaving none left over for him or Sammy. The boy nodded mutely as his father put his hand on the door-latch then turned back to him.

"Son, I'm so proud of you." John opened the door and walked out closing it behind him.

Dean didn't care who saw him as he started to cry and running to the picture window he pulled the curtain aside. He never said a word as Jewels came up to stand next to him, her hip resting ever so lightly against his arm. John made his way to the Impala, stumbling momentarily along the way, and Dean's breath hitched while Jewels silently asked God to take care of the hunter. They continued to watch as he drove away, then waited a few minutes longer but he never changed his mind and came back.

Jewels broke the silence and said matter-of-factly, "He looks pretty weak. I don't think he's gonna make it."

Dean suddenly turned on her and shoved her hard. Glaring at her, tears still shimmering in his eyes, he demanded, "What do you know? My dad's the strongest, smartest, most kick ass guy out there and there's no way he's not comin' back!"

"I know," Jewels agreed softly and Dean's anger slowly dissipated.

She always, always knew the right thing to say and he felt stupid that he actually thought she believed his dad wouldn't make it back…even though a minute before he'd thought the very same things. Dean suddenly felt a hundred times better and apologized, wiping his nose on his sleeve. "Sorry I shoved you."

"S'okay," she told him and herded him toward the kitchen where Sam waited patiently watching cartoons, "But to make up for it, you're cookin' pancakes…and don't make 'em look too retarded."


	17. Chapter 17

Moonrise was hours past and it was freezing cold, as cold as a witch's teat or a well digger's knee. Having never touched a well digger's anything but very familiar with the anatomy of witches, John Winchester opted to go with the teat and threw another log on the fire he'd laid in a pit dug out of the snow. Ross Downey's dilapidated cabin stood behind him but he decided it was best to confront Mari out in the open, to see her coming. His nickel-plated, ivory handled, Colt 1911 was in his right side jacket pocket, its bulk and weight comforting. A Sig Sauer P220, also chambered in 45 ACP, was tucked away in the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back. Each gun was loaded with silver bullets, seven rounds and one in the chamber in the Colt and seven additional rounds in the Sig, respectively.

As he waited patiently a murder of crows suddenly burst forth from deep in the forest and flew overhead, the moon reflecting off of hundreds of shiny black wings as they rose with a cacophonous ruckus, then turned gracefully to dive back down, settling into a collective roost in the treetops near by. It was an ominous sign for the superstitious but for the seasoned hunter it usually indicated a bear or a large cat or some other predator in the vicinity and, since bears would have been deep in hibernation, John ventured to guess that it was a mountain lion...or a werewolf.

The demon hunter sat very still and listened to the crash of low-lying branches as something ran through the dense forest in his direction. Seconds later a bull elk broke through into the clear cut surrounding the cabin and stopped, its deep chest heaving, its eyes rolling frantically, scaring the crap out of him. As John jumped up his head began to swim and he became weak in the knees and fell over backwards.

Powerful muscles bunching, the elk shot up in the air a good three feet then took off at a dead run breaking to John's right and disappearing back into the black timber. John pulled himself up and sat back down on the stump he'd dragged to the fire pit and wiped his clammy face on his jacket sleeve. He resumed listening but could only hear the nervous rustling of the crows in the trees above him and, when his watch read midnight, the faint tolling of church bells calling the faithful to midnight Christmas Mass.

The eerie sound of the tolling bells echoed up the valley from town where, unbeknownst to him, Jewels led the boys into the old church at the end of Argentine Street. Well fed and well rested the three of them walked down the center aisle and took seats in the first pew directly in front of the nativity scene. Sam's eyes widened as he stared at the figures and he rushed up for a closer look when Jewels told him it was okay. Dean sat on the other side of her, his arms crossed, a sour look on his face. He would rather lick the smelly sneakers of the biggest bully in school than be sitting in a church where people worshiped a traitor and a liar and Jewels gave him points for going along with her just to make Sam happy.

Even she hadn't been to a church of any kind since the war but had come tonight, not to ask for forgiveness or for salvation, but to make a deal. She would stop holding a grudge, stop blaming God for allowing ungodly things to happen to good people and she would stop wasting what many called her 'God given talent' if He would send his angels to watch over and protect John, Sam and most especially Dean Winchester.

Jewels had no doubt that John Winchester was a believer. He believed in evil, knew intimately that it existed and so conversely believed in good. He saw it in the things he did, the people he and his fellow hunters saved. Sammy, he believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. How hard would it be for him to be allowed to believe in God and angels for a little while longer? But Dean, now he was a hard case.

The way Jewels saw it Dean Winchester was already a hard-boiled cynic, believing only in his father's invincibility and ability to keep them safe and together as a family and, beyond that, nothing else really mattered. The boy longed for stability, for the idyllic life he saw on the television and in the movies but didn't really think he'd ever get it or that he particularly deserved it. Beyond the catastrophic events of his early childhood, and Jewels wondered just how much a child of four and a half could really remember, something or someone had blinded this boy to his own self-worth. Bringing him to church she wanted to let him know just how precious, a word she knew he would absolutely hate, he was and that he was never truly alone.

Having seen God's work time and time again on the battlefield Jewels was also a true believer but had suffered a crisis of faith when, for every medical miracle, there seemed to be ten disasters. She'd soon become numb to everything and everyone, even those closest to her, and had been numb ever since. That was until a little squirt with beautiful green eyes and shaggy, dark blond hair had walked into her bar and showed her that there were still people out there who really needed and deserved help. And she would give help anyway she could but it came with a price and, that was, that no matter what happened or how bad things got, how sure Dean was that God didn't exist or that God didn't give a rat's ass, He would never, ever abandon the boy.

Midnight mass ended, as did her bargaining session with the Almighty, and the small church emptied out and the two of them sat in the growing silence while the little one slept peacefully.

"Ah, shouldn't we get outta here?" Dean asked watching restlessly as the last of the parishioners filed out and the doors closed.

"They never lock the doors; we can stay as long as we want," Jewels gently suggested.

"I wanna leave and Sam's already crashed out," he told her pointing to his brother.

"Churchaphobia?" she asked and Dean nodded. "You know, unlike me, an adult..." she started.

"Ha!" Dean laughed.

"As I was saying, smart ass…".

"Dude, you said 'ass' in church," he again interrupted her.

"Again..." she said hitting him with the stink eye, "I'm an adult and I can't get away with praying for stuff like money or toys or candy but you're a kid and you can."

"Why would I waste my time doing that?" he asked her.

"Can't hurt," she answered simply and he though about it for a moment.

"If I didn't think God was a fake I wouldn't waste prayers on junk, I'd pray for my dad to come back."

"That's what I prayed for."

"You pray?" he asked incredulously.

"Sure. How do you think I beat you at apple ball?"

"You so cheated," he laughed but after a few moments he asked her softly, "Jewels, do you think my dad prays?"

"Oh, yeah," she assured him fervently, "Every single day. For both you and snoozin' Sammy there."

Dean looked up at the cross on the alter in front of them and thought that just maybe she was right, that it couldn't hurt and he began to pray for his dad like he'd never prayed before.

Jewels waited until she felt Dean was ready to go then scooped Sam up from the pew and carried him down the aisle. She stopped at the votive candles and told Dean, "You can light one; it seals the deal with God so He can't welsh on it later."

Holding the long taper to the flame of an adjoining candle Dean lit one of the small red candles and asked, "So now it's a done deal?"

"Yep, you can sleep easy tonight, my man," she assured him and feeling a whole lot better he smiled and Jewels did too…until she ran into Ray DiAngelo.

As a favor the deputy sheriff drove them home and happened to mention the black Chevy that he saw parked in Mari's driveway the night before was now parked at the bottom of the pass.

John thought about the car, too, and wondered if it would even start after sitting so long in the freezing cold. He wondered the same thing about himself. After leaving Jewels and the boys he'd slept away most of the afternoon cramped up in the Impala's rear seat and he'd had a devil of a time waking up to make the trek up the mountainside. When he'd arrived at the cabin he was completely drained and longed for more sleep and, as he sat before the fire, his eyes drifted shut and he wondered if he was getting sick. When he opened them again he wondered if he was getting killed because there she was, a she-werewolf in all her malevolent glory.

Slinking into the clear cut she rose up on her hind legs to stare at him with unholy red-gold eyes before she lunged, clearing the roaring fire, and hit him in the chest knocking him backward off of the stump. John rolled to his right and came up onto his knees pulling the Colt from his snow packed pocket. John raised the gun in a hand that shook as much from the cold as from the weakness that continued to steal over him and the werewolf bounded toward him again. At the last moment she juked to the right and his first shot missed her. His second and third shots also went wild and playing with him she turned back and slammed into him again sending him into the air.

John fell, sprawled out on his back, the wind knocked out of him and, gasping for breath, suddenly froze as the feted smell of her breath assaulted him. She was back on all fours and directly over him, sniffing him, a thick chain of putrid saliva dripping onto his cheek and he wanted to scream. Slowly he lifted the barrel of the gun up toward her belly and fired point blank. The hundreds of crows that had never moving at the sounds of the Colt's first reports finally blossomed into the night sky at the unearthly shrieking, half human, half wild animal as the bullet passed through her.

The werewolf lifted her head and shrieked again, this time more human than feral beast and, in a death frenzy, her claws tore through his heavy jacket and shirt and into his stomach as she tried to lunge forward and deliver an infecting bite. Gun still in his hand, John grabbed her muzzle and pushed up holding her snapping jaws and sharp teeth away from his face and, growing weaker, she slowly died and morphed back into human form, her face in his hands.

No longer a struggling hundred and ten pound wolf but a hundred and ten pounds of dead weight John pushed her off of him, the naked body rolling partway into the fire where it would eventually be consumed, all traces of the abomination he had killed gone. As he slowly stood up and felt the searing pain in his gut his first thought was of his sons. He was badly hurt, his already exhausted body ready to give up the ghost, but he would not, could not, let Christmas Day be forevermore the anniversary of his death. He would make it back to Jewels and die tomorrow.


	18. Chapter 18

"Dean," Sam whispered and shook his brother's shoulder. "Dean," he said again and shook him a little harder. "Dean," Sam said a third time and this time he pinched his brother's arm. "Dean," Sam said lifting first one of Dean's eyelids then the other.

"Okay, okay," Dean finally capitulated and opened his eyes.

"Do you think he came?" Sammy asked in an excited whisper.

"I don't know," Dean answered sleepily then sat up, "He knows about the time you put all your vegetables under the edge of your plate until dad was gone and then hid 'em in your sock." Sam's eyes opened wide and his nose wrinkled as he grimaced. "And he knows you flushed the sock down the crapper a week later."

Sam just sighed. He knew he was doomed and, because misery loves company, he asked, "Do you think he knows about the time you put the lemon stuff from the kitchen cabinet in your Fresca and got all funny and then threw up?"

Dean thought about it for a moment. "Nah, he was out of the office that day and besides anyone who did anything bad on July 17th gets a pass."

"Well, what about the time…"

"On vacation in Florida."

"What about…"

"He was driving Mrs. Clause to the mall. Big shoe sale."

"But…"

"Listen Sammy, Santa doesn't care about big kids like me, only little turds like you. I'm sure he brought you somethin'."

"And he knew we're at Jewels' house? He knew how to get here?"

"I'm positive he knows exactly where Jewels' lives. She's the biggest kid I ever met. He probably left her a Happy Holiday Barbie."

Sam smiled and liked the idea that Jewels was a kid. Maybe she would be in his class when he finally went to school and he took off at a dead run out the bedroom door.

"Crap," Dean swore and threw off his covers to chase after his brother and cut him off at Jewels' bedroom door. But his dad wasn't sleeping in Jewels' bed. Jewels wasn't even sleeping in her bed but was in the living room standing by the front window, her ever-present coffee mug in her hand, peering outside, Sam now by her side.

"Where's your Barbie?" Sam demanded pulling on her bathrobe sleeve.

Jewels snorted, "My Barbie?"

"Sammy wanted one for himself," Dean told her before Sam could repeat their conversation.

Sam vehemently denied it. "I don't want a dumb doll."

"Well, why don't you go see what Santa did bring you." Jewels suggested returning her gaze to the window.

Sam turned slowly eying the Christmas tree suspiciously and spying the brightly wrapped packages beneath it rushed forward and dropped down on his knees.

Dean sat down on the couch where he could watch Sammy and still look out the window. Jewels sat down next to him and handed her cup of coffee over to him. He took a sip and looked over the rim and into her eyes.

"He'll be back. A deal's a deal," she assured him quietly while Sam surveyed the packages before him excitedly.

Every Christmas before this one had been a non-event but this time the youngster had hit the mother load. There were four gifts and he asked Dean to sit down beside him and read out the tags. There was one from his dad, one from Jewels, one from Dean and one from Santa. Choosing the biggest package first, the one from Santa, Sam squealed with delight when Leonardo, the blue Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle poked its head through the wrapping paper followed by Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello. John's gift to his son was the turtle's nemesis Bebop because Ninja Turtles and small boys needed to kick butt.

Dean's gift was about a half a ton of penny candy that he'd bought with the money he'd made 'slaving', as he liked to point out, for Jewels at the Ram, a gift that would keep on giving because he knew Sammy would generously share...or else.

Jewels' gift was the last to be opened and, having no chance in hell of knocking the Turtles out of the number one spot in Sam's heart, she hoped he would like it anyway. She watched apprehensively as Sam picked up the old wooden box that had his name written on it and opened it up.

The glass ball that had hung in the window for so many years sat nestled in the shiny blue silk lining. He looked up at Jewels and smiled, "She's pretty."

"She sure is," Jewels agreed, "Prettiest glass ball I've ever seen and it's really, really old so be very, very careful with her."

Dean watched as Jewels' eyes again went to the front window. Maybe he should tell her not to worry, that his dad never showed up until Christmas was over and that God had better keep up his end of the deal.

Jewels was watching for John but at the same time she was watching Dean as he watched Sam open his presents. Satisfied that the day would be special for his little brother the older boy never once searched for the gifts that he knew he wouldn't get and it broke her heart. Though not as easily pleased as a five year old she would have loved to have found something for Dean in town but, tourist trap that it was, Georgetown's pickings were slim for almost ten year olds.

Also if half of what John Winchester had told her was true, and she had suspended her belief system for the time being and maybe for evermore, driving to Denver wasn't an option. It would have been too dangerous. She did have something she wanted to give to him and handed him a legal size envelope that Dean, not knowing what to think, took from her outstretched hand and opened cautiously. He pulled out an official looking document and unfolded it.

He looked up at Jewels, a stunned look on his face, and asked, "Is this on the level?"

"Sure is. There are even some street tires for her in the garage."

"But I don't even have a license," he said plaintively taking back every ugly, unkind thing he had ever though about the Smurf-mobile, including calling it the Smurf-mobile.

Jewels figured that little fact hadn't stopped him from driving so far but she didn't want to contribute any more to his delinquency so she said, "It'll be here waiting for you when you do."

"What is it?" Sam wanted to know and made a grab for the paper.

Dean held it up out of his brother's reach and taunted him. "You only got some goofy turtles," he said excitedly, "but I got a car!"

Sam looked around for the box that should have held Dean's car but nothing else was under the tree and he looked back at him uncertainly.

"The Bug in the garage, Sammy. The ice car."

Sam smiled, "Can I ride shotgun?"

"Well, you sure as heck can't drive her...ever."


	19. Chapter 19

Washing up the breakfast dishes Jewels knew something was amiss as soon as she saw the side door to the garage standing open. Minutes later as she went outside, the two boys following, she saw the frozen, bloody hand print on the doorknob and knew something wasn't just amiss but terribly wrong. "Dean, take your brother back inside."

Although John's exact words had been, "Take your brother outside as fast as you can!" Jewels' urgent command struck an equal amount of fear into his heart. Like the fire that had killed his mom, something awful had happened and Dean hustled Sammy back inside. His heart racing, he dashed tears from his eyes before his brother could see them and go all-spastic on him and got him situated in front of the boob tube with his precious turtles. He then made his way cautiously back outside.

Inside the garage Jewels was crouched down by the open driver's door talking softly to his dad who was sitting in the driver's seat of the Volkswagen, his eyes closed, his features twisted in pain. As she tried to get him up and out of the car her voice may have been quiet but her words were pretty harsh, Dean thought, as he listened.

"You need to get your ass out of this car and into the house. I can't help you if you're just gonna sit here and bleed."

"Not bleeding anymore," he hissed out between clenched, chattering teeth.

"Well, then you must be okay," she said sarcastically, "or running out of blood!"

John's Carharts, instead of their original gold color, were a muddy brown-red from his midsection down past his knees and when she pressed the bulky material it literately oozed blood. "If you're not gonna get out of the car then move over so I can drive you to the hospital."

"No hospital," he wheezed.

"Well, then move over so I can at least drive you to Bakerville. When you die I can dump your body in a convenient mineshaft because large item garbage pick up's not 'til next month."

John turned his head to look at her and when he saw the concern in her eyes he asked facetiously, "You'd do that for me?"

Jewels breathed a sigh of relief. "Sure, what are friends for if not to dispose of the remains?"

Jewels had no idea how true she was and he laughed weakly.

"Besides, if you give up and let yourself die," she said for his ears only, "he wins."

Not "she" wins John realized. Even though he hadn't told Jewels the werewolf was dead and that her husband's death was avenged she evidently didn't think it was as important as reminding him of his one reason for living, to kill the yellow eyed demon and save his sons.

A ghost of a smile crossed his blue tinged lips and she knew he was going to let her try and save him. Jewels stood up and reached in to grab John's upper arm to leverage him out of the car and said, "Dean, come over here and give me a hand."

The boy jumped about a foot then ran up next to her. "Does Ripley know you got eyes in the back of your head?" he asked her. His question was typically sarcastic but his voice was high pitched as fear threatened to close his throat up altogether.

"Yeah, and I can predict the future, too," she told him gently, "Your Dad's gonna be fine but I need you to help me steady him when I get him on his feet. Then I need you to make sure my bedroom's a "no Sammy zone" for a little while."

"Will do," Dean told her resisting the urge to put his arms around her and hug the life out of her. Instead he just brushed up against her and gave her a gentle shove with his body, the same thing she always did to him when she wanted to hug him but didn't because she knew he'd think it was lame.

Dean didn't think it was lame anymore. He felt safe with Jewels, safer than with his own father who would get nuts at times and bark out so many orders that he and Sammy didn't know if they should be afraid of what might be out there or of him. His Dad tried to keep it together but sometimes he lost it…big time, something Jewels never did.

Dean knew girls were wimpier than guys but he didn't think for a minute that Jewels couldn't kick some serious ass, just never his or Sammy's, no matter how bad things got. They were pretty bad right now and, instead of yelling at his dad for being a butthead and hiding out in the garage, all she wanted to do was get him inside and fix him up.

John Winchester, weak and disoriented, let himself be led into the house and finally laid out on Jewels' bed. She immediately cut through his insulated overalls, his jeans, his shredded shirt and thermal underwear so she could inspect the deep gouges to his mid section. "Any lower, buddy, and you'd be of no use to me," she told him with a laugh as she gently probed the cuts with equally gentle fingers.

Lifting a weakened hand John took her wrist and pulled her close. "Check for puncture wounds," he told her, "And if you find any I want you to shoot me."

"But..." she started and he stopped her with a look of pure misery.

"You're a triage nurse, Jewels, and I expect you to save me," he insisted, "but only if you can. If I'm bitten you gotta let me die or kill me."

She looked at him and didn't quite comprehending what he was telling her. He was hurt badly but if the blood loss didn't kill him and if infection didn't set in he'd be okay with only a batch of scars with which to impress the ladies.

John gripped her wrist again, tighter, and looked into her eyes and she saw the stark terror within. He wasn't worried about blood loss or infection of the normal kind, he was worried about being infected by a werewolf. Jesus Christ, this was beyond her realm of experience or expertise, way beyond, and she stood up and walked out of the room.

As John watched her go he closed his eyes and prayed to God to let him be there for his sons, at least until they could fend for themselves, but if he couldn't... He opened his eyes again and Jewels was standing in the door way with a number of towels draped over her arms and resolve in her eyes.

"I've called for an ambulance," she started to say and he tried to interrupted her but she cut him off, "Ross used to work for them and Dean and I are gonna cannibalize the supply racks while Sammy distracts the driver. I told him the driver would let him run the siren and who could resist those puppy dog eyes?"

"Jewels..."

"Don't worry, Winchester, I won't let them get sent to reform school," she said and rushed out of the room when she heard the crunching of the Ambulance's tires on the icy driveway and Sam's excited whoop.

Fifteen minutes later she was back and loaded for bear while 'EMT in training' Sammy Winchester was in siren blowing heaven and old man Naughton from next door was fit to be tied. All in all a very good caper.

With the ambulance on its way back to the med center Dean entertained Sam while Jewels hung an IV bottle from a coat hanger on a curtain rod to start an infusion of much needed hydrating fluids, laced with a powerful antibiotic, into John's arm. She then sent him off to la la land with a big ol' dose of morphine so she could puncture him numerous times with hypodermics filled with Lidocaine and start inspecting, cleansing and packing the wounds with an anti-infective. She then sutured his wounds and left a bunch of small rubber drains sticking out of him that made him look like a human porcupine.

John, although drugged to the gills, was not out for the count and came through it all like a champ. He never once cried like a girl, as she so compassionately warned him not to, and, wiping her brow on her sleeve, she surveyed her handiwork. Not exactly a work of art but it would do in a pinch. She pulled a sheet up over her patient, bundled up the bloody towels that were thrown around the room and grabbed the plastic bag with her medical waste stuffed into it.

As she turned to leave the room she saw Dean standing in the doorway, his face drawn and anxious, and Sam peeking out from behind him. "Jewels, do you still want me to keep Sammy out?" he wanted to know.

Looking at Sam's frightened eyes she decided that not knowing would be the scarier option for both youngsters so she shook her head, "No, it's okay. You can both come in." She knew she wouldn't need to hush either one of them or warn them to behave because they were John's good little soldiers, had been since the day of the fire, and they filed in silently and approached the bed.

Dean looked at the blood that was already seeping through the bandages to color the white fabric of the sheet and timidly stretched out his hand and touched his father's hand gently with one fingertip.

Sam, Donatello teenage mutant turtle clutched close to his chest, whispered, "Is he asleep?"

"Yeah," Jewels assured him, "He'll be sleeping for a while but in a couple of days he'll be able to play Ninja Turtles with you."

Dean looked at Jewels as if she was back riding the short bus again. With her help he knew his dad would get better but he never, ever played with either of them.

Jewels could only shrug her shoulders and remind Dean, "He came home."

"Yeah," Dean conceded but still felt like he got the raw end of the deal. His dad had made it home for Christmas all right…but he might be a werewolf.


	20. Chapter 20

Christmas day had been one of the worst days and one of the best days of Dean's life so far. His dad had come back; Jewels had patched him up and had watched him like a hawk while he and Sam went with Ray DiAngelo to hang out at the sheriff's office. They had gone on a 'ride along' in the cruiser to the train depot at Silver Plume to make sure there were no mishaps when the old steam locomotive was taken out for its Christmas day winter run around the loop high above Clear Creek overlooking Georgetown and back again to Silver Plume.

Sam had gotten to sit in the engineer's lap and hold onto the throttle. He got to blast the whistle at the appropriate crossings and sometimes just when he felt like it causing mini-avalanches to fall down into the creek bed. No longer planning to become a ninja turtle the youngest Winchester now wanted to be a train engineer and had returned wearing his new "old and thoroughly broken-in" engineer's cap.

Jewels noticed the cap and told him that Junior Gates had been wearing that same cap since before she'd moved to town and that Sam must have really impressed the old man if he gave it to him as a gift. If offered to her she would have more than likely held it with a pair of tongs and thrown it away but one woman's trash is one little boy's treasure.

At the sheriff's station they'd messed around taking turns throwing each other into one or another of the holding cells and handcuffing themselves to the iron bars. Ray fed them Beanie Weenies and Sprite and they voted it their new favorite lunch on the spot. The three of them also played a record number of games of checkers. They'd had a blast and Dean thought Ray had a good time, too, although he kept reminding them to tell Jewels that she owed him big time and Sam wondered how much money he'd loaned her in the first place.

Back at Jewels' Dean had slept like a log and only woke up once to shove Sammy away when the goober farted. When he finally got up out of bed the first thing he noticed was that Jewels had re-arranged the furniture. The couch was now situated right in front of the door to their bedroom and he thought it was a good thing he hadn't had to whiz in the middle of the night because he would have run smack into it.

He could see Jewels' head as she sat in the middle of the couch. Sam spotted her, too, and crawled out of bed, grabbed his turtles and made his way quietly over to the doorway. Clutching his toys to his chest with one hand he gently smoothed down her serious case of couch hair with the other.

She turned her head and smiled at him. "Mornin', Sammy," she said pulling his engineer's cap down over his eyes.

"Morning Jewels," he replied, "Need the bathroom."

She turned around on her knees and hoisted him up over the back of the couch to freedom and he ran to the bathroom. Dean rested his elbows on the couch back, his chin in his hands, and watched as Sam headed to the can.

"Climb on over," Jewels told him and moved a blanket to make room for him to sit next to her.

He hopped over effortlessly and bounced down beside her. "How's my dad?"

"'bout the same," she told him passing off her coffee mug to him.

Dean took a sip and grimaced. It was stone cold and when he reached to set it on the newly relocated coffee table he caught a glimpse of the Colt tucked under the accent pillow. "He looked like hammered dog crap yesterday," Dean continued, ignoring the gun.

Jewels snorted a laugh and replied, "Why yes, yes he did. He looks about the same today."

After a moment of silence Dean then told her, "I like what you've done with the living room."

This time Jewels guffawed then clapped her hand over her mouth and hoped she hadn't awakened John. "Thank you," she told him…then pushed him over.

Dean knew exactly why she'd moved everything around, why she'd slept on the couch, if she had even gone to sleep at all, because she looked like hammered dog crap, too. He knew that to get to him and Sammy his dad would first have to go through her.

Sam came bounding out of the bathroom and stood in front of her awaiting further instructions.

"You want hotcakes for breakfast?" she asked him.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," he chanted excitedly.

Dean stood up and grabbed her hands and pulled her to her feet, "And some decent coffee."

In the kitchen the three of them worked like a well-oiled machine and, as they made pancakes and brewed fresh coffee, Dean threatened to de-shell the next mutant ninja turtle that karate chopped him and Sam wisely hid his herd of turtles in a drawer while they ate.

The younger Winchester had just begun to explain how awesome it had been to drive the train when a noise came from the other room. Her face draining of all color, Jewels stood up and yanked open the junk drawer where she had put John Winchester's Sig and motioned for the two boys to stay quiet.

The living room was empty so she made her way cautiously to her bedroom doorway and saw that the noise had more than likely come from John as he tossed restlessly on the bed. She pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. He was burning up with fever and mumbling unintelligibly. Next she ran her hand down his cheek and, grasping his chin gently, she saw only the familiar shadow of his heavy, dark beard but, to make sure, she lifted his lips.

The sudden sound of Dean's voice made her yelp and clutching her chest. She turned quickly and he backed away thinking she was pissed. Seeing his obvious distress she held a finger to her lips and quietly moved toward the door grabbing a book from the shelf before ushering him out. In the living room she handed Dean the book, a first aid manual. "Find the chapter on reviving an old woman after sneaking up on her and scaring the crap out of her."

Thoroughly duped, Dean started to turn to the index page of the book then stopped. He looked up at her and she laughed. "I just wanted to tell you that it probably wasn't dad…being a werewolf," he explained, "It's not nighttime or a full moon any more."

Jewels realized she still held the gun in her hand and tucked it out of sight behind her then remembered that everybody knows that "Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolf's bane blooms and the moon shines full and bright." "I knew that," she said flipping her hair nonchalantly.

"Yeah, right," Dean said and grabbed John's backpack from the floor next to the door. He set it on the couch and rummaged through it until he found the battered leather day runner resting at the bottom. Handing it to Jewels told her, 'It's got all about werewolves in there...and lot of other stuff, too."

Jewels really didn't want to read it, or even touch it for that matter, but took it anyway. It was the book of the dead, the not so dead and, if one didn't take care, the soon to be dead and she knew if she read it it wouldn't put her to sleep like most books did but would more than likely keep her up for nights to come.


	21. Chapter 21

The hands that prodded him, poked him, were insufferable on his skin, first burning like fire then freezing like ice. He looked down at his belly where most of the pain was concentrated and watched as whoever it was, whatever it was, pulled thin threads of his intestines painfully from his body. Sweat poured down his face and into his eyes blinding him and he opened his mouth to scream but found his tongue was thick and unwieldy and he could only utter a pitiful mewling. Oh, my God. Was that him, he wondered as he heard himself? He then heard a hushed, soothing voice comforting him but still belied by the cruel, vengeful hands.

Hours later he opened his eyes and saw her, Mary. Why? Why was she doing this to him? He had thought her always so kind, so caring. Now her hands brought nothing but pain. He watched her face and it blurred as tears filled his eyes and his chest suddenly constricted more painfully than his gut as sadness threatened to drown him.

The following day Mary's voice cut through the fog and asked, "Where are my children?" and when her visage become clear once again he saw she was beautiful but with a horrible secret. Her children? Then he remembered.

They'd had sons; beautiful boys and they had been so proud, so happy only to later be so cursed. He wondered again, why? But she didn't answer, just hushed him, her hands now gentle and soothing. My boys, he thought smiling and closed his eyes again. In his mind's eye he saw them standing before him, scared, beaten and bloodied and he just looked on, ashamed of what he had done. This time he heard the pitiful sound of his own howl and felt Mary's strong hands push him back down on what felt like a bed of nails. I would never hurt them, he avowed...but she would. She would and she had.

Jewels watched as tears slipped from beneath John Winchester's thick lashes and his face twisted in a misery only he knew. Five days he had lain like this and five nights she'd slept with one eye open, a gun within easy reach. Jewels wondered how much longer either one of them could hold out.

The fever still raged in him, his lucid moments almost non-existent. The morphine barely cut the pain and he called plaintively for his dead wife one minute then reviled her with curses the next. On it went, hour after hour, day after day. Jewels hugged herself and rubbed her arms as much for warmth as to massage sore muscles and ease the pain of her bruises. John Winchester was a big man and, with Ray's help, she'd finally resorted to tying his wrists and ankles to the bedposts. A good idea, she thought, absently rubbing the bruise on her cheek as she watched him pull against his restraints calling for Sam and Dean to move away from someone or something only his fevered mind could see.

Dean and Sam were safe, protected, in the care of Ray DiAngelo. Raymond 'Of an Angel', a real and true angel who kept the boys away and entertained them while their father ranted and raved and failed to heal.

Hours later and at her wits end the thought of calling in a priest to either exercise him or to give him Last Rites crossed her mind. She opened his journal and looked at the few phone numbers scribbled inside and wondered which one to dial and who would finally answer if she did. After reading through the book the possibility of 'what' might answer also crossed her mind.

Jewels returned the book to the dresser and began to pace the room again. Back and forth, back and forth until she heard her name followed by a plea for water. It was only a whisper but it was the first lucid thing he'd said in five long days. She turned and seeing that his eyes open and clear for the first time in days thanked God. Relief flooded through her and she smiled and told him she'd bring him water, or tea, or coffee or even a beer, whatever he wanted.

"Water," John repeated then closed his eyes, drifting into an exhausted sleep.

Eying the fresh bag of fluids she'd managed to keep connected to his hand Jewels knew that he was well hydrated and instead of getting him water she sat down in the antique rocker next to the bed and pulled her legs up in front of her. Resting her chin on her knees she just watched him as his breath, so labored before, flowed smoothly and quietly in and out of his lungs settling into the rhythmic pattern of someone sound asleep. They had made it over the first hurdle.

His fever had broken and he would now recover from his wounds but there was one more obstacle to get by, one more test to pass. In twenty-two days, January 21st to be exact and four days before Dean's tenth birthday, the Full Wolf Moon would rise in the cold winter's night sky. Fitting, Jewels thought.

John Winchester had shown no signs of turning into a werewolf in the waning Cold Moon of December but, according to his research and his own handwritten notes, the older the werewolf transferring the 'virus', the purer the strain and an infected person could, and most probably would, change for only one night and one night alone in a single moon phase, the night of the full moon.

Jewels sighed and let her head fall back in exhaustion. Instead of celebrating Dean's tenth birthday they could very well be making funeral arrangements. They had won the battle but could, in the end, have already lost the war.


	22. Chapter 22

It was New Year's Eve 1988 and there he was standing behind the bar with Jewels. Awesome except for the fact that he was wearing a lame-ass green top hat covered with glitter. Totally bogus. Dean slipped it off and set it down on the back-bar while Jewels poured a tray full of tequila shots in one continuous pour and shoved it into Sara's outstretched waiting hands. Sara of the big boobs...Sara of the long, dark hair...Sara of Dean Winchester's not so innocent dreams.

"Stop mooning and start washing," Jewels ordered and placed the green, sparkly hat firmly back back on his head. Pointing to the silver cardboard tiara with red glitter letters spelling out 'Happy New Year' on her own head she told him, "If I gotta wear a dorky hat, you gotta wear a dorky hat. Besides Sara likes a man who's secure enough to show off said dorkiness."

Sara or no Sara Dean reached for the hat to take it back off and Jewels swatted his hands away. "Okay, okay," he capitulated and went back to washing glasses.

As usual the Ram was packed to the rafters this New Years Eve because where else was anybody gonna go? Vail? No. Aspen? Hell, no. And while Idaho Springs boasted as many bars as churches, itty bitty Georgetown had only one bar to its half a dozen churches and that bar was currently filled with a good number of the town's church goers as well as a few of its heathens.

The real reason everyone was ringing in the New Year with great optimism and renewed hopes for better times was because Jewels had the most generous pour in all of bartenderdom. Not two for the price of one but more like three. Along with the stiff drinks came a stiff warning. The sheriff's department would be out in full force, which meant that besides Ray, Cassandra Pope would be manning a cruiser instead of a desk and Sheriff Able Eisenhower would also be out on patrol that night.

Jewels heard a definite down turn in the level of bar racket and looking up she spotted the man himself making his way in her direction. "Evening, Able," she said pleasantly wiping up a spill from the bar top, "Coffee?"

"That'd be nice, Jewels," he told her as he stepped around to the end of the bar and pulled off his gloves, "Who's the kid?"

Dean stopped washing his five thousandth glass, turned and met the cop's scrutinizing stare head on.

"Ah, they like to be called little people," Jewels told the chief and handed him a mug of hot coffee.

"A dwarf?" he whispered incredulously leaning in to speak more privately to her.

"Midget," she lied.

Bullshit, he thought, and asked Dean, "What's your name?"

"Robert Plant," Dean replied then turned back to dunk another glass in the rinse water.

"Got any ID?"

"I left my wallet in my car," Dean explained without missing a beat and without turning back around, "Might get my pocket picked with this crowd."

Able walked over to the wash station and nodding slowly gave Dean the official police version of the stink eye. "You know I'm gonna have to write you up, Jewels," he said turning his attention back to her.

"Able, you promised to write to your own momma over a month ago and never did," she told him, "And besides, how would it look? Me in jail with my sparkly tiara and all."

The sheriff frowned and shook his head. Able never knew what to do with Jewels Downey because, for a woman, she had more balls than Spaulding. Like right then when she tried to convince him that the kid was a midget and with a straight face, too. But he could never get one over on her. If he wrote her a summons to court he'd only come out looking like a jackass so tonight he would turn a blind eye and as soon as he got back to the office he'd write his mother. Finishing his coffee Able put his mug on the bar and when Dean reached for it he pulled back and, with his and Dean's hands on the cup, warned him, "Make sure you get home at a decent hour, Mr. Plant."

Dean nodded, snatched the mug away and saluting the Sheriff said, "Will do."

"Enjoy your evening, Jewels," Able told her and pulled on his gloves.

"When you write your momma say "Hi" for me. Tell her I miss her," she called out as she and Dean watched the big, burly officer of the law cross the bar and disappear out into the night.

"A midget?" Dean said in disbelief.

"Robert Plant?" she rejoined and splashed a glass into his sink water on her way into her office where, once there, she could turn her thoughts to John and Sammy.

John Winchester turned his head and looked again at his youngest son sleeping peacefully beside him in Jewels' big bed, his turtles arranged neatly in a halo around his head and couldn't quite believe the boy was really his. With Jewels and Dean gone to the bar he'd had a chance to spend some quality time with Sammy, even play a little Mutant Turtle with him before his youngest had dropped off to sleep. But the rambunctious five year old had taken it out of him and, exhausted, he pulled his hands down his face and felt the soft hairs of his beard and wondered if he could talk Jewels into shaving him in the morning.

She'd probably laugh at him and tell him he didn't know how close he'd already come to her slitting his throat. He'd seen the bruises on her arms and the one on her cheek and, although he'd been so out of it that he couldn't really be held responsible, he still fell like ten kinds of shit. And some of the visions he'd seen, the hallucinations, were incredibly disturbing and frightening and he shut his eyes to try to block them out.

Were they a warning, a portent of things to come? Never! He'd never hurt his sons, would gladly give up his life for either one of them and he would kill anyone who even dared to threaten them; anyone. Taking a deep breath he opened his eyes and was not surprised to see her standing next to the bed looking down at Sam.

"Get away from my son, Mari," he said, his voice quiet, deadly.

Mari sat down next to Sam on the bed and smiled at John coldly. "I miss you, John," she purred looking down at the sleeping boy then frowned when he repeated himself.

"Get…away…from…my…son."

"I don't fuck little boys," Maridiana sneered then added, "Only their big…strong…handsome daddies." She rose up and, rounding the end of the bed to stand over him, reaching for the sheet. He didn't try to stop her as she lifted it up. "Oh, you really are happy to see me," she cooed and lowered the sheet to just below his bandages.

He wasn't glad to see her, didn't want to see her or talk to her or fuck her ever again but his body betrayed him. She leaned over and took a deep breath and told him with a feral gleam in her eye as she ran a red lacquered fingernail over the bandages, "You smell like death, John Winchester."

"And you need to get the hell out of here...before Jewels gets back. It's done, Mari."

Mari turned her back on him, her long hair swaying gently, and took a few steps toward the dresser. She glanced at the items sitting on top of it then turned back to stare at him. "Jewels will never know I've been here…unless you tell her."

"Never happen," he told her and threw off the sheet ready to get up and toss her out on her ass.

"Don't!" she ordered sternly then softened her voice, "I'm leaving. I'll give you a few more days to recuperate, to get rid of the stench."

"I don't want you coming back."

Mari walked to the bedroom doorway and stopped. She turned and smiled at him and suddenly he did want her to come back. He had the most intense hard-on and if he'd had the strength he would have gotten up and grabbed her and thrown her on the bed and fucked the shit out of her right next to his sleeping son.

Instead, she left the room and walked to the front door. Opening it she stepped out into the cold night air and closed it softly behind her, her sultry laughter following in her wake as she walked to the Range Rover.

John sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed and after a couple of painful false starts managed to get up and make his way slowly into the living room. He needed to see for himself that the bitch was truly gone and, when he was satisfied that she was, he sat heavily on the couch. As he sat he realized that the couch had been pushed across the room from where it had originally been and now barred the doorway to the room where his kids slept.

God, Jewels, he thought and ran his hands through his hair then hung his head. He was sickened by the way things had spiraled so out of control and, sadly, he knew he needed to get the hell out of her life before he screwed it up even more.


	23. Chapter 23

John Winchester knew he was the world's worst patient but he had finally run into a real life Nurse Ratched and her name was Jewels Downey. She'd taken to fussing over him, gently pushing his hair back from his forehead, massaging his stiff neck muscles, performing a million other ministrations to make him more comfortable but when he said something she disagreed with or disapproved of she took vengeance on him by pulling his bandages too tight or poking and prodding him unmercifully. But each day, in spite of his perceived abuse, he was getting a little better and a little stronger.

It was still two weeks until January 21st and the full moon and the two of them lay together in the bed they again shared, the couch back to its original position. John had wanted to pack up the boys and leave, to head up to South Dakota to the house of a friend, Bobby Singer, but Jewels had vetoed the idea when his fever had unexpectedly spiked again. Besides, she had everything planned.

On the 21st she would remind Ray DiAngelo that he'd invited Dean and Sam to a sleep over at his house that night. He would say she was crazy and that he'd done no such thing and she would insist that he had and that he'd already cleared it with the Sheriff and, when he checked, Cassie would back her up. Ray would most likely just roll his eyes and say something about women sticking together and about Jewels being not just crazy but bat shit crazy before he went out to buy Beanie Weenies.

Some men were easy, like Ray, but others, like John Winchester, were not so easy. He had liked her idea of sending the boys away but he wanted her to go with them, to have Ray keep watch and shoot him if he needed to. Ray had only glanced at Ross' journal and was pretty far from being a convert and John knew that a moment of "I can't believe what I'm seeing" could lead to a moment's hesitation and disaster.

"So you think you could shoot me?" John asked, propped up on extra pillows, one hand behind his head, Jewels resting in the crook of his arm.

She snorted a laugh and told him point blank, "If it comes down to you or me, baby, it's gonna be you."

If he hadn't known her history, her training and her fortitude he'd have taken her flippant answer as pure bravado but, when push came to shove, he was sure she could push him off a cliff without a moment's hesitation and by the time he hit the jagged rocks below she'd be there waiting to clean up the mess, his boys safe and secure in her comforting arms until she could get them to Bobby.

"When was the last time you were on a range?" he asked rubbing his hand down the soft, smooth skin of her arm.

She turned her face to him and told him, "Basic training…but it's like sex, once you do it it's kinda hard to forget how."

He didn't want to look at her. He was afraid he'd see a flicker of uncertainty or fear in her eyes and he'd have to drag up and get to Bobby's and time was getting short. Or worse yet he'd see none of the above and realize he'd been sleeping with a sociopath. If Jewels was indeed a sociopath she had one giant character flaw and that was a huge capacity for love.

She loved his kids, he was sure of that, and maybe even loved him a little although he didn't deserve it because just one look at Mari and all thoughts of Jewels flew right out of his head. He'd heard of chemistry but how could he have such a powerful attraction…and reaction...to a virtual stranger and someone he wouldn't necessarily have been attracted to in the first place. Too dark, too rich and way too demanding. He liked his women blonde, blue eyed and compliant. Well, blonde and blue eyed anyway.

"Tell me about your wife, about Mary." Jewels said and John's gut clenched at the mention of her name.

He was so confused about Mary, so angry with her and so very, very sad that she'd died so horribly. It was as if every feeling, good or bad, he had about her collided painfully within him and he didn't know where to begin. "She was my high school sweetheart," he did finally say, "and she stuck with me through the thick and the thin of my coming back from the war. I was a changed man, to say the least, but she treated me as if nothing was different, as if those terrible years had never happened."

He smiled grimly and continued; "I think she wanted me to feel safe, secure, needed me to. She gave me a child, a beautiful baby boy named after her mother and then another, just as beautiful and named after her father. And I did feel safe and secure and loved until she ended up gutted like a slaughtered lamb and stuck to the ceiling of the nursery she had so lovingly decorated with her own hands."

Tears started to fill his eyes never quite spilling over his lashes. He blinked them away unshed. "The night she died I sent Dean outside with Sammy and stared up at her while ducking the flames that reached down from above. I didn't fully comprehend the horror of it all but now I know that Hell itself was raining down on me from above and it all had to do with her. Mary brought this on us and paid with her life."

"All of this...werewolf stuff, the stuff in your journal…" she started to ask then defended herself when he looked at her suspiciously, "Yeah, I read it…and I'm not the only one." John's mouth set in a grim line at the news but she pressed him anyway in her quest to understand it all, to get the big, ugly, terrifying, over the top, grind house drive-in movie horror picture, "All the stuff, it's all connected?"

"Yeah," he finally said, "It's all got to do with good and evil, heaven and hell."

"But these things in your book sound like urban legends, stories to scare your girlfriend so you can hold her close and cop a feel."

He laughed and squeezed her, letting go of his anger and frustration for the moment. He had bigger werewolves to fry and he needed to concentrate all his efforts to make sure his sons would be safe if he ended up on the wrong side of Jewels' gun.

Jewels turned on her side and took his chin and guided his eyes to hers. "It's all about Sammy, isn't it?"

He looked stunned, even guilty, as she stared at him.

"You treat him differently and not just because he's the oldest."

John thought for sure she meant to say 'Sam'. He treated 'Sam' differently because he was still the baby but he saw that she had said just what she had intended to say.

"You treat him like Sam's the heir apparent and Dean's the brother who'll never inherit the crown. He's only there to protect and serve."

Now he was hurt and guilt ridden and angry. "It is all about Sammy but not for the reasons you think. I don't love one of my kids more than the other, never have, never will…but Sammy…'

Jewels heard the ring of truth in his words but actions spoke louder than words.

"Sam's special. Special to someone I only know as the yellow-eyed demon. He was there when my wife died, hell, he was probably there when Sam was conceived and he wants my boy for reasons I can only imagine."

Jewels could feel John's heart hammering in his chest and gently stroked the warm skin over his heart.

"I need to find this demon, kill him before it's too late, too late for Sam and for Dean."

"But they're just kids. Can't you leave them with someone, with me, while you're hunting?" she asked plaintively.

John took in a deep breath of air, exhaled noisily and shook his head. "We have to keep on the run. Sometimes chasing it, sometimes being chased and God, Jewels, if I could go back in time, change things, I would in a heartbeat…"

She thought he was talking about changing his life, exchanging a life on the run for a life in the suburbs, but he was talking about her, about her life.

"...because if I had it to do over, friend or no friend, I would have never come here, never brought this to your doorstep because everyone connected with us ends up dead."


	24. Chapter 24

John sat on the couch, the coffee table pulled up close, his Sig Sauer and Colt both spread out in pieces on a folded towel before him. He'd cleaned them hundreds of times, could almost do it blindfolded or in his sleep and that day was no exception. He plodded along mindlessly, two shotguns and a rifle waiting on deck and the little house, except for the occasional klink of metal on metal, was empty and quiet.

Sam and Dean had actually run out the door first thing that morning and, as he and Jewels watched, were swallowed up by a big yellow school bus with Clear Creek County District R1 in black letters on the side. Jewels had insisted that a couple of weeks of school here and there were better than none at all and had registered them as the Young brothers, Angus and Malcolm, although Dean had taken to calling Sammy 'Anus' when he thought no one could hear.

The principle of the grade school had stopped and looked pensively at them for a moment but had nonetheless enrolled them in kindergarten and fourth grade respectively, Jewels assuring her that Malcolm's transcript was 'in the mail' along with Angus' birth certificate. John had agreed but reluctantly. He had no plans at all until after the 21st when he would either be free to continue hunting the yellow-eyed demon and the things that go bump in the night or he would be in hell. Either way things were on hold until then and his life had taken on a small semblance of order, order he found quickly turning to chaos when Mari walked into Jewels' house uninvited and unwelcome.

"I told you to stay away," he said standing up and stepping around the coffee table.

"I waited until your 'little family' was gone," Mari offered and walked over to study the gun pieces, "I like a man who's good with his hands. If you're going to be playing house with Jewels I could use a man with your talents at the Ram."

John thought 'no way in hell' until she reached out and touched his collar, then his neck and a bolt of lightning shot through him unswervingly toward his groin. Mari smiled at him and fifty points dropped from his IQ and, when she walked into the bedroom, he followed on her heels like a big, doe-eyed puppy. Mari turned and smiled seductively at him and it was dazzling although there was no emotion behind it or in her eyes other than lust.

Mari undid his jeans and pulled them down just enough and, pushing him back onto the unmade bed, she took complete control and slowly worked him into a frenzy with her mouth and hands until he forced her hands above her head and, lifting her skirt, took her roughly, fucking her to within an inch of her life…or was it his? He fell immediately into an exhausted sleep to finally awaken hours later when he heard the school bus stop in front of the house.

Pulling up his jeans he sat with his eyes closed on the end of the bed until Sammy climbed up and sat beside him. His son held a lined sheet of paper torn from a Big Chief tablet in his hand and, struggling to keep his eyes open, John asked him with great effort, "What have you got there, Sammy?"

"My new name and my letters," Sam told him with great pride and held out the paper for John to see. He added with a wrinkled nose, "Jewels' perfume sure stinks."

Ignoring Sam's comment John asked, "Where's your brother?" and struggled to just stand.

"Fixin' the guns." Sam told him.

Dean, his head down scrubbing the Colt parts intently, heard his dad say his name but refused to look up or to acknowledge him in any way. John barked his name out again angrily and Dean replied sullenly, "What?"

"Bad day?" John asked, Dean's scowl not lost on him.

"Not 'till I got here. When are we gonna leave, anyway?"

Dean, intuitive beyond his years, knew that the smell that hit him smack in the face when he'd gone into Jewels' bedroom smelled nothing like her. His dad had probably screwed someone else in there and now all he wanted to do was go, to get out of there before his dad pissed Jewels off, or worse, made her cry.

"Why do you want to go?" John asked him.

Because you're a big, fat douche bag! he wanted to yell but only said, "Because."

Dean hated it when his father crashed and burned and at that moment he was flamin' out big time. Dean could see it in his father's eyes and it scared him to think his dad might not be as strong and invincible as he needed him to be. The great John Winchester might not be able to protect him and Sammy from the horrible stuff and he, Dean, might have to step up and do it himself and it wasn't fair because he was just a kid.

It also bothered Dean that his dad would want to be mean to Jewels on purpose just because of his mom dying and leaving them and all and when his dad, looking like he was gonna keel over on the spot, sat down next to him on the couch he had to make a conscious effort not to scootch away from him.

John knew but refused to acknowledge the fact that his son suspected him of screwing Jewels over, literally, and made it plain that whatever the boy had on his mind he needed to keep it to himself. Things needed to go on as before and Dean needed to cut the 'angry bullshit'. John told him as much and with teeth clenched the boy nodded his understanding.

Dean would pretend there was nothing wrong, the way he always did with Sammy and now with Jewels, but it would take a long time for him not be mad at his dad.


	25. Chapter 25

The day of the Wolf Moon had finally come and things in the little house on Taos Street went from 'everything is mostly okay' to 'total crap on a Ritz cracker'. Dean had become distant, to say the least, and Jewels wondered if it had to do with his fear of being left an orphan or of the old 'something's rotten in Denmark' that she'd smelled of late. Dean had also become downright hostile toward his father and John had once more become hard and controlling, drilling the boy like he was a Green Beret. Dean's only respite was, heaven help him, school where he'd had no trouble fitting in with the locals and, like the rock star for which he had been temporarily named, he had a slew of groupies. Unfortunately none of them, even the ones in the sixth grade, had a rack like Sara from the bar.

The scenario with Ray had come off exactly as Jewels had predicted only he hadn't said she was 'bat shit crazy' but as 'mad as a monkey on a trike'. The boys were safely ensconced in his house where they were most likely doing manly things, like making farting noises with their armpits and seeing who had the loudest, longest and/or smelliest burps. Her money was on Sammy as he could dredge up some monstrous belches that even surprised him when they came out.

The closer it got to the wolfing hour and, for reasons of her own, Jewels had moved the couch back to the guestroom doorway and had taken to sleeping there with two loaded handguns and surprisingly, or maybe not so much, John hadn't said a word about it. He was fairly well healed up in terms of an earthly dog attack but looked gaunt and was exhausted most of the time and Jewels suspected that there might be some other supernatural side effect of which she had no clue.

Twilight darkened the valley and Jewels knew the moon would rise soon soon after. She sat down next to him as he rested on the bed and John asked her, "You ready for this, Jewels?"

She was and she wasn't. She had his list of names and numbers with Bobby Singer's circled in red at the top. He was the 'go to' guy, the closest thing they had to a living relative and the one she was to call. He was also the one and only person she was to deliver the boys to should John go all Larry Talbot on her. Brushing his hair back she smiled sadly. However things turned out this was her goodbye and tears welled up in her eyes. She would miss them, especially Dean, and she silently reminded God of their deal as she dashed the tears away and wrapped the chain around John's neck and padlocked him to the wall like a vicious dog. She handed him two 'knock you into next week' sleeping pills and a glass of water and, with a squeeze of his shoulder and a sad backward glance, she returned to the couch and began her vigil.

Twelve hours and ten minutes later she returned to the bedroom and unlocked the chain around his neck and stood back and just watched him as he slept. His dark lashes were lost in the shadowed hollows beneath his eyes but he was 100 percent human and she wanted to slap him and tell him he might live longer if he stopped burning the candle at both ends as well as in the middle.

As if he knew she was standing and staring at him John opened his eyes and said groggily, "Not a werewolf, huh?"

Jewels smiled back at him but it didn't come within a thousand miles of reaching her eyes. There was no joy in her at all and her face reminded him of a hideous mask, serene and beautiful, but so incredibility cold that he was instantly alert. "Well, if your not a werewolf than you sure as hell must be some sort of dog because I'm betting the farm that you've been humping Mari doggy style and in my bed," she told him and wrapped her arms around her middle as if she were in physical pain. She took a step back when he shifted in the bed to get up and told him. "You need to go."

"Jewels…" John started but wondered what in the hell he was going to say. What could he possibly say and not appear to be more of an asshole than he already was.

"You need to go," she repeated and turned her back on him and, with military stiffness, walked out of the room.

"Jewels, please!" he called out to her and rolled out of the bed. Listing badly to the right he crashing into the dresser then lurched into the living room using the door jam and the walls for support only to find that she'd already snatched her coat and was gone.

"Damn it!" he said gnashing his teeth in panicked frustration, "Goddamn it!" He knew it was going to end. He just didn't want it to end so badly. Yeah, he knew he and the boys had to go but he never, ever wanted to hurt Jewels. Not like this, not this way, not ever. He'd been dreading the day that they'd finally have to walk away. He was prepared for that pain and would see Sammy and Dean through it as best he could. He could have dealt with it because it would have been an honest pain but what he'd done to her was total bullshit and he had no excuses, none whatsoever.

John could tell himself that it was a blessing in disguise, no heart breaking goodbyes for him or the boys, just pack up and slink out of town. He could chase after Jewels and try to explain but he still had no excuse for what he'd done. Maybe it was better for him to take the higher of the low roads he now had to travel and do as she asked and just leave. With legs like jelly John fell back against the wall and slid down to the floor. He covered his face with his hands and waited for his heart to stop doing double back flips. Whatever was wrong with him he was sure he deserved it and he wondered if this was what a broken heart felt like or maybe just one that was being crushed under a thousand pounds of guilt. He took a deep breath and wondered where Jewels had gone.

Half an hour after she had told John Winchester to get out of her house and her life Jewels Downey sat on one of the toilets in the women's room of the Ram. She was wrapped up in her coat, hiding in the stall and wishing to hell she'd never given up smoking because she could have really used a Salem right about now…or a big fat doobie. What was a little cancer when you just had your heart, not to mention your pride, stomped on and, even though she wasn't pinned to the ceiling, she felt like she'd been gutted.

What did she really expect? she asked herself as she sat dabbing her tears with great wads of toilet paper? She had expected to cry…a lot…when the boys and their father left. She just hadn't expected to cry and be so goddamned pissed off and so hurt all at the same time. To keep things in perspective she had to keep reminding herself that John Winchester was, after all, just someone she'd picked up in a bar and she shouldn't have expected anything.

The man was handsome all right and caring…when he wasn't being a total pig. He had two wonderful kids and if they could have lived happily ever after she would have jumped at the chance but happily ever after had never been an option for her. Just ask her husband. Oh, yeah, he was dead, a suicide by werewolf. They could have at least parted friends, she bemoaned, but he'd screwed even that up and when she heard the door open and smelled the same expensive perfume she'd smelled on her own sheets she quickly blew her nose and said from inside her fortress, "You're back, huh, Mari?"

"Yes," came the answer, "I have some business to finish up here then I'm off to Chicago again."

"Well, I just kicked your business out of my house," Jewels said blowing her nose again, "Oh, yeah, and I quit."

Mari sighed and stared at the closed stall door. It was not a sigh of regret or dismay but of disgust and she asked, "Are you crying, Jewels Downey?"

"Nope, I just did about a thousand dollars of that blow you hide in your office and my nose is bleeding like a bitch," Jewels answered sarcastically.

Mari knew that wasn't true. Jewels didn't use drugs but the thought of her, or any woman, crying over a man was totally alien to her. "You're quitting over John Winchester."

"No, no way. A better offer came along, that's all."

Mari didn't believe her for a second and said, "Suit yourself, Jewels, but it's a shame."

"That so?"

"I thought you were more like me."

Jewels barked out an incredulous laugh. "I could never be the man-eater you are, Mari...no offense," Jewels said and added, "And I don't expect a letter of recommendation but I do expect a generous severance check."

"Are you leaving town?"

"Well, first I'm gonna get drunk on your dime and then I'll probably throw up all over your bar."

Mari laughed, "And after that?"

"Then I'm leaving…finally," she said making the decision right then and there and it felt good, " I have promises to keep." A promise I made to God on behalf of a certain midget, Jewels thought, and a promise I made to my daughter.


	26. Chapter 26

Jewels never imagined how much stuff had been crammed into the little house on Taos Street until she had to get rid of it all. The furniture, which had come with the place when she'd bought it, was gone, Sold to an unscrupulous antiques dealer from Aspen who would jack the prices up sky-high to make up for the fact that he'd had to pay her fair market value. She may only be an ex bar manager with a languishing master's degree in nursing from Boson College but she didn't just fall off the turnip truck.

The nasty little man was as gay as a Dutch window but, while appraising her bed, had surprised her with a licentious leer when he noticed the large eye bolt in the wall with the chain and padlock still hanging from it. The blood drained from his pumpkin face when she remarked, "That's for my dog. You haven't seen a pit bull around here, have you?" and he finished up his business quickly, never once haggling over the prices she'd set. He then minced his way off into the sunset to return the following morning with a large truck and several burly men.

As the truck pulled away Jewels looked at the large wad of cash in her hand and smiled. 'One woman's trash' she thought and her mind went immediately to Mari and to John Winchester. Shrugging her shoulders she shoved the money into a backpack and surveyed the empty house. Only a small pile of personal items stood by the door, a suitcase and a banker's box. She would be traveling light as she made her way back to Massachusetts, Salem to be exact, to try and pick up the pieces of her shattered life and to atone for past transgressions.

A knock sounded on the door and echoed around the empty room and Jewels, expecting either Ray wondering what in the hell was going on with her or her neighbor wishing her well and to never darken the neighborhood again, was surprised when she looked down at the midget and he said to her in a sorrowful but determined voice, "I know you don't like us anymore but it's my dad. He won't wake up."

Jewels stared at Dean and he began to shimmer and blur as tears filled her eyes and overflowed her lids. They spilled down her cheeks as Dean watched in horror and started to back away. He expected her to be mad, really, really mad, but he never, ever expected Jewels to just break down and cry. He'd come to her because she was tough as nails and knew exactly what to do. He needed her help and here she was crying like a girl so he decided to go find Ray instead.

Before he could bolt she grabbed his jacket collar and pulled him inside. "Where is he?" she asked barely getting the words out of her constricted throat.

"At the Alpine Inn," he told her and glanced at the door wishing he were already hoofing it uptown to Ray's house.

"Stay!" she said in what must have been her Army voice because he didn't move a muscle while she went into the kitchen and made an urgent phone call. She hurried back into the living room, her dead husband's med kit slung over her shoulder, and stopped at the door to grab her coat and the backpack. "Let's go," she said dabbing her red eyes and wiping her nose with a handful of Kleenex.

Relief flooded through Dean. He knew the old Jewels was back and ready to kick some ass when she shoved the banker's box into his arms and he followed her out the back way. She stopped at the garage door long enough to ask him, "Is it cool if we take your car?"

Stunned by her question he stammered, "Yeah, sure, okay," and helped her lift up the garage door.

Inside the VW bug sat, all street legal and road ready. They got inside and it turned over on the first crank and Jewels backed it out of the garage giving it plenty of gas to break through the newest windrow. They traveled up to 6th street, took a right and headed for the Alpine Inn in silence. Finally Dean cleared his throat and told her, "I'm sorry. I know you hate us but I didn't know where else to go. And I didn't mean to make you cry."

He said the last as if she'd committed a cardinal sin and maybe she had. Thou shalt not cry in front of a distrusting, scared and emotionally scarred kid who thinks you can walk on water. But it was Dean thinking that she didn't like him anymore that had brought on the waterworks and her forehead furrowed in a frown. She turned to look at him as they turned onto Argentine Street. "You've only been gone, what? Three days? How'd you get so dumb in just three days, Winchester?" she asked him and his temper heated up at the insult but cooled right back down when she told him, "I only cry like a girl over people I love."

Dean breathed a sigh of relief. She didn't hate him and Sammy but he still believed she might hate his dad because whatever had happened when they'd been at Ray's must have been real bad because she let them leave without even saying good-bye. "My dad did something crappy to you, didn't he?"

"Just something grownups do to each other sometimes."

"Do you hate him?"

"Hate's probably too strong a word," she replied, "I'm just mad at him."

"How mad?"

"Mad enough to give him a death wedgie."

Dean laughed then went all serious on her again. "What's wrong with him do you suppose?"

"I don't know," was all she said. She wasn't about to share the fact that Dean's father wasn't the first guy to go to sleep in Georgetown and that the others had never woken up so they drove the rest of the way in silence.

Pulling into the parking lot of the Alpine Inn Jewels spotted Ray's cruiser parked in front of room six. The door was ajar and Sammy's face peered out around the door jam. When he spotted Jewels and his brother he bolted out of the room and into her arms.

"Don't hug her too hard, Sammy," Dean warned him, "Unless you want to see her start bawling again."

Sammy didn't care. He just hung onto her for dear life.


	27. Chapter 27

"Hey, Ray." Jewels greeted the deputy as she made her way over to the bed where John Winchester lay. It took all of her poker skills to keep her demeanor calm, her voice steady and her eyeballs in her head. If he wasn't already dead it was only because his failing systems hadn't told his brain yet. He was ashen, cold and clammy and barely breathing.

"I tried to call Rosie but they're out on a call," Ray told her.

"No time to wait for an ambulance anyway. Let's get him in your cruiser," she said as she pulled the blankets off of the bed and handed them to Sam.

Ray grabbed John's arms and hoisted him over his shoulder like a sack of grain and walked out into the sunshine. Dean rushed to open the door of the police car and Ray put John in the back seat. Jewels stuffed a pillow under her patient's head while Ray took the blankets and covered him up.

Sam, expecting Jewels to go with his dad, moved closer to Dean who placed his hand protectively on his brother's shoulder and the two of them watched apprehensively. John Winchester had been shot before, torn up, even stabbed with a knife but he'd never been sick before and, from what Dean could tell, maybe dying. What was going to happen to him and Sammy if he did? He promised to always take care of them.

Ray's radio barked and Cassie's voice came through. "Ray, you there?"

The deputy leaned in and picked up the mic, "Yeah, Cassie. I'm getting ready to transport a critical to DGH."

Sirens began to wail in the distance and a couple of vehicles with flashing grill lights and volunteer firefighter stickers on the bumpers shot by the motel making their way to the firehouse in town.

"Roger that Ray but we just got a call from Jewels' neighbor. Seems her house is on fire."

Both Ray and Jewels looked past the Alpine Inn toward the pass and the black plume of smoke that rose ominously into the sky. Dean and Sam turned to look wide-eyed and Dean thought that God was really taking a crap on them today.

"The neighbor says she's not there. Do you know where she is?"

Jewels shook her head vehemently and Ray told Cassie, "Nope, haven't seen her but I'm sure she'll turn up. I'll be back a quick as I can." Ray got in the cruiser and Jewels stuck her head in the window and looked at John. She saw the smoke from her burning house through the back window and wondered, what the fuck?

"Get him admitted as a John Doe," she then told Ray, "I'll get his stuff and the boys and we'll take it from there."

"You okay, Jewels?" Ray asked and wondered what was going on under her calm exterior.

"I'm fine Raymond," she said and squeezed his shoulder, "And thanks for everything."

Ray's mouth set in a grim line. He knew Jewels wouldn't be coming back any time soon and he'd miss the hell out of her. Everyone in town would...except maybe that snooty bitch on the hill. He always had the feeling that if Jewels dropped dead in front of Mari, she'd just step over her to get where she was going. "You take care, Jewels," he said then added with a smile, "and write if you find work."

She chuckled and stepped back as Ray backed up cautiously then took off like a bat out of hell down the service road and up the entrance ramp to I-70, lights flashing and siren blaring. Jewels walked to where the boys stood and looked one last time at the smoke over the valley and, herding them back into the motel room, thought, God, you and I need to have a little talk.

"Where are your dad's keys?" she asked Dean and he pointed to the dresser. She snatched them up and told the two of them, "Lets get you all packed up and hit the road. If we didn't have to stop for a tow bar for your Bug, Dean, I bet the Impala would beat Ray's Ford to Denver."

"I don't know," he told her stuffing his things into his ratty backpack, "Ray's got a 351-cubic-inch Windsor V-8 and the Impala's only got a duce and a half."

"Your dad teach you about cars?"

"Yeah," Dean said sighing, "We used to have a garage before..." his words trailed off.

"You think he's gonna laugh when he gets a look at the hamster on a wheel in your V-dub?"

"Oh, yeah," he told her, "He'll laugh his ass off."

Jewels helped Sammy pack up his various treasures and was pleased to see the glass ball among them. They then drove the Impala to the gas station for the tow-bar and, after hitching up the Volkswagen, made it to Denver in a little less than three hours. They parked in the hospital's parking lot tucked away far from sight near the ambulance entrance and the three of them started for the doors, Jewels in the lead.

"First we need to find a phone to call Bobby Singer," she told them as they walked, "Then I need to acquire some doctor's scrubs."

"By acquire do you mean steal?" Sam asked without missing a beat or a step as two of his turtles battled each other.

"It's a sin to steal," she reminded him as they entered the emergency room triage area, "So I'm just gonna borrow them."

"Without asking," Dean added and Sam smiled.

The ER was filled to overflowing with sick and injured people and Sam glued himself to Jewels' leg while Dean scoped out each person they passed on the way to the bank of pay phones. She hadn't mentioned it in the car but he knew Jewels must have been pretty spooked about her house burning down so mysteriously. "They" had probably found them and Jewels realized that she couldn't trust anyone anymore and, if she didn't want to talk about it, it was cool because Sammy would probably just get scared and she had things covered. When they were packing up at the motel Dean had seen Jewels palm his dad's Colt and stick it in the waistband of her jeans before pulling her bulky sweater over it.

After reaching him by phone Jewels talked to Bobby Singer at great lengths and had come to the conclusion that, firstly, he knew a lot about the normal, the abnormal and the paranormal and would send someone to evaluate the situation and get John Winchester out of the hospital if need be…provided he lived long enough. And secondly, he didn't think too highly of John Winchester for whatever reason but would offer them sanctuary at his place in South Dakota. All they had to do now was to wait for John to get better and for a Caleb Hunt to contact them.

Breaking a twenty-dollar bill, Jewels handed Dean a fist full of change and told them to play the vending machines like they were Vegas slots while she went to check on their father. She didn't have to say any more and Dean took Sam's hand and led him to the bank of machines in the hallway checking for escape routes as they went.

"This is so unfair, God," shemuttered as she walked unchallenged into the doctor's locker room and slipped into a pair of surgical scrubs. Donning a cap she grabbed some gloves and a mask and clipped the name tag, one of many, she'd grabbed out of the Impala's glove box. Jewels looked nothing like the photo on the badge but if she walked and talked like she 'owned it" she could have stuck a picture of Moe Howard of the Three Stooges to her chest and no one would have looked twice. She wandered brazenly through the emergency room's 'holding pens' and finally found John Doe stuck in a room in the back.

Picking up his chart she was shocked by his vitals. It was if he'd just had the life sucked out of him. He was fading fast for no apparent reason and, because he was a John Doe with no insurance, they probably weren't going to look very hard for one. A nurse stuck her head into the room and was surprised to see Jewels standing by the foot of the bed, the chart in her hand.

"Doctor, someone's here asking about our John Doe," she told Jewels and jutted her chin toward John then whispered as if he could hear, "Evidently he's the alcoholic in the family."

Jewels was expecting Caleb Hunt but had to make sure it was really him waiting to see John and not the boogie man, or woman, for that matter. "Tell them to take a seat. I'm taking him to radiology right now. He's probably bleeding internally and that's why his vitals are so low."

The nurse seemed satisfied with her explanation and was about to return to the front desk when she realized she hadn't seen John Doe's physician before. Dean, who had made his way unnoticed from the waiting room, watched her and when he heard the dreaded, "I haven't seen you before. Are you new here?" went into action.

He ran into the room shouting and clutched the nurses arm. "Ma'am you gotta help us! It's my brother! He's choking!" he shouted excitedly and pulled on her arm dragging her toward the door, "I dared him to eat a whole bag of Skittles at once and the doofus did it and when I farted it made him laugh and now he can't talk or breathe!"

Nurse Heimlich's, as Jewels now thought of her, shocked look was priceless as she took off with Dean. They passed a tall man, perhaps in his late thirties with prematurely gray hair and sad, gray eyes as he walked toward the room. He entered and extended his hand, "Caleb Hunt. You must be Jewels."

"Doctor Peter Gabriel," she said flipping her badge. She was thankful to see him because it was just a matter of time before the nurse returned.

"Well, doctor, we need to go, now!"

"There's someone at the desk..." Jewels started but Caleb cut her off.

"I saw them. Where are you parked?"

Them? Jewels thought and said, "But he can't go. His vitals are tanking..."

"He doesn't need a hospital. He needs to be as far away from here as possible and as fast as possible," Caleb told her in a morose voice.

Jewels suddenly knew that the hospital was the worst place John Winchester could be and started disconnecting him from the IV lines and other various pieces of equipment.

As they worked feverishly Dean came back into the room pushing Sam in a wheelchair, the younger Winchester's face covered in splotches of brightly colored sugar coating. Sam had actually taken the dare and had jammed a whole bag of the candies into his mouth and when Dean came running dragging the nurse behind him had made the universal sign for choking with his hands around his neck but it was no ploy. Sam had gone into full on choke mode.

Nurse Heimlich had dug the wad out of his mouth and, finding no other obstruction, sent him off to the bathroom to wash his face and to find his parents. He and Dean had made it as far as an empty wheelchair in the hallway before heading back to the room.

Caleb picked up John with some effort and put him in the wheelchair and the five of them headed toward the ambulance entrance and the Impala.


	28. Chapter 28

Bobby Singer's home was a house many years in transition the cheery, feminine touches either pushed aside or slowly rotting away replaced by the macabre. Gay lace curtains, dust covered and damaged beyond repair, still framed windows now covered with tin foil or old newspapers. Herbs and bottles of 'God only knows what' littered the kitchen counters and jammed the cupboards while the good china sat in the hutch in the dining room untouched since it was washed and put away after her funeral years before.

A library filled one small room entirely and had spread its paper tendrils out into almost every other room of the house. Books piled upon book on the occult, on the morbid, the ghoulish, the gruesome, the grisly, the ghostly and the ghastly. Even his cookbooks would have sent Paul Prudhomme, a Cajun chef famous for slaughtering his own chickens, screaming into the night.

Jewels walked slowly through every room taking in the faded roses of the wallpaper and the pretty, ornate pair of single beds in Dean and Sam's room, the paint now chipped and cracked. The delicate and finely stitched bedding that should have been in the room had long since been replaced by sturdy flannel sheets and itchy, olive drab, army surplus, wool blankets.

The dresser in her room with its one bottle of perfume, the fragrance long since spoiled by time, and dust covered lacquered jewelry box that played Lara's Theme from Dr. Zhivago when she opened the lid had seen better days, while the large queen sized wooden bed with matching bedside tables echoed of far happier times when a husband and wife were once in love and looking forward to the future.

What the house had once been was now only a fragile shell of fading beauty surrounding the stark, lonely and perilous existence that had become Bobby Singer's life since the day he'd killed his wife, her demonic strength giving credence to his claim of self defense. The fact that he was never charged didn't make it any easier for him, only kept him out of a corporeal jail while, from that day forward, he served a life sentence in a jail of the devil's making.

Jewels had read snippets of Bobby's life as it had intertwined with John Winchester's in John's journal and she held no animosity toward him for the tragic events that had turned his life upside down. She felt only compassion and sadness for him and wouldn't presume to judge him, or anyone else for that matter, after what she'd been through for the last two years, including her husband's death and her own mad dash out of Colorado.

Walking into the room John now occupied she sat down on the bed next to him and, pushing his dark hair back gently, she checked for fever, a habit that was dying hard. Pleased that his color had returned and his heartbeat, once weak and erratic as it fought to just keep him alive, was now strong and steady as his waking moments became longer and his thoughts more lucid.

Bobby watched from the doorway as she touched John again, this time cupping his cheek, and he was actually jealous of the son of a bitch. "I saw the work you did on him," he said to her and watched as she turned to look at him, "It was damn good."

Even in her calm serenity as she sat with her patient he could see it. A haunted look in what he was sure had once been clear, sharp, blue eyes along with a certain wariness to her movements and, although it wasn't readily apparent, she probably had a healthy distrust of everyone and everything by this time. A kind of post traumatic stress disorder of the supernatural kind. "We could use someone like you," Bobby told her flat out and she just stared at him.

Was this it, God? Was this how she was supposed to fulfill her end of the bargain? Take all of her years of schooling and experience and the well paying job she could get at almost any hospital in the world and trade them in for some eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog? Jewels stood up and made sure John was well covered because when Bobby had cut himself off from the world it included the power company and the old wood stove in the living room did nothing to heat the upstairs bedrooms. She turned to him, smiled and asked, "Do you have anything to drink?"

"Caleb brought me some Seagram's Seven," he told her stepping out of the doorway so she could pass, "It's out in my workshop".

"That'll do," she told him as they headed down the stairs.

Sam and Dean both stood when she came into the living room. Not out of respect, she knew, but as a knee jerk reaction to the harbinger of bad news she'd lately become. She walked over where they'd been playing Monopoly and looked down at the board and saw that Dean had the lion's share of property and almost all of the money. "You know it says in the rules that after an hour you have to swap places with your opponent," she said nonchalantly.

Dean looked at her as if the short bus had run her over this time and insisted, "No, it doesn't."

"You ever read those rules?" she asked him pointing to the instruction booklet.

He hadn't. No one had, ever, and he opened his mouth to protest.

She gave him a little shove and wondered if he would ever stop falling for it. "Still soooo easy, Winchester."

Dean looked at Bobby and rolled his eyes.

"That's how we always played," Bobby deadpanned.

"Your dad's a whole lot better," Jewels assured the boys, "So your Uncle Bobby and I are gonna go outside for awhile before it gets dark. You make sure and call me if he wakes up and needs anything." She followed Bobby to the door and turned to watched as Dean swapped places...and fortunes...with his little brother.

Bobby's workshop was just that, a solidly built wooden outbuilding filled with woodworking tools of all kinds and piles of wood. Two ornate wooden boxes with carved symbols and hasps for locks sat on the workbench and Jewels looked at them and then at him dubiously.

"Curse boxes," he explained.

"I'm guessing this isn't a twist on the old swear jar."

Bobby snorted and pulled two glasses from one of the cabinets and put them down on the workbench. He then reached for the bottle of whiskey. "Just a box to keep whatever you put in it...in," he said and began to pour. He glanced at Jewels as she inspected the boxes and kept on pouring until she had a serious double shot which she held up and lifted in salute to him and said, "To Absent Companions."

"Absent Companions," Bobby agreed then looked her dead in the eyes, never breaking contact, until she volunteered more.

"95 Evac," she said and he looked at her with new respect.

"Thirteen cent'er, Fifth Marines," he said and she looked at him with a whole new set of eyes.

He looked older than his thirty-eight years but then he was most likely living on borrowed time, a sniper's life expectancy not much longer than that of a demon hunter. He'd come through one war only to run headlong into another. Taking a long swallow Jewels dropped her gaze and said in a subdued voice, "I thought the war was over."

Bobby opened his mouth to falsely reassure her that it was but closed it and ran his hand through his hair instead and sighed. They stood in companionable silence awhile and drank more of the whiskey before Jewels took a stroll around the shop taking in the ordinary that had suddenly become extraordinary. Bags of salt for melting snow...or not. Iron pieces for shims…or not. Plastic containers filled with water for drinking…or not. She walked back to where she had started and held out her glass and, as Bobby filled it again, she asked him, "Bobby, if you had a mandatory family reunion right now how many people would show up?"

He filled his glass again and took a sip. "None."

"Dean said the same thing, that there's no one left alive." Bobby just watched her, letting her feel her way down the slippery slope. "How much danger am I in?" she asked and looked down at the sawdust covered floor, afraid to meet his eyes.

He wasn't about to tell her, to scare her into doing something rash, so he offered her his help instead. "We can protect you. I told you before that we could use someone like you. Sometimes hospitals and mainstream doctors just aren't an option."

"I'm not a doctor..."

"I've seen evac nurses in action, better than most doctors and I'd trust my life to any one of 'em...in a heartbeat."

"Okay, you can take care of me...but what about my daughter?"

After processing what she'd said, Bobby's eyes widened perceptively and his opinion of John Winchester tanked even more. "Did that son of a bitch know you had a kid when he "found" you?"

The room suddenly grew colder than it had been before, even with the small kerosene heater cranked up to high, and she looked at him with cold blue eyes. "He didn't find me. He just walked into the bar. I wasn't even supposed to be working that night. He could have taken care of the whole thing without ever meeting me," she said defending John, "Except that he would have died."

"Yeah, he would have," Bobby agreed and wondered if it might have been better if he had. Bobby knew that Jewels didn't accept the fact that John Winchester was that devious, that single minded, that he could have set up the whole thing. And just maybe he hadn't but nonetheless he'd brought trouble and laid it directly at the door of her burned down little house in Colorado and who knew what might have already happened to her kid.

"Listen, Bobby, I don't believe in coincidence but I do believe in fate and now I believe in the unbelievable. I sent my daughter to live with her grandparents to protect her from whatever demons my husband had and I won't put her back in the line of fire. She's just an innocent…like those boys in your living room."

Bobby sighed and hesitated a moment before telling her, "Yeah, but now as far as the yellow eyed demon's concerned you're guilty of giving aid and comfort to the enemy…John Winchester."


	29. Chapter 29

Jewels stood in the doorway of his room, her face lit by an old kerosene lamp, her hair flowing freely. She looked quite fetching in Dean's Damaged Justice Metallica Tour t-shirt with the band members emblazoned across her breasts. John guessed it was the best she could do considering the rest of her clothes were lost in the fire. Propped up on pillows he watched her for a moment then motioned for her to come in.

He'd eaten some soup, the first nourishment he'd had in days, and the empty bowl sat next to the lamp and, as she came closer, she noticed he'd showered and shaved. He still looked drained, even more so after Bobby's tongue-lashing. Jewels reached out to feel his forehead and he grabbed her hand, his grip surprisingly strong.

"Why didn't you tell me you had a daughter?"

Jewels sat down on the edge of the bed and continued to hold his hand as she spoke, "I didn't think you needed to know. You were just someone who was supposed to leave the next day."

Somehow hurt that she'd never revealed her secret to him he told her, "I didn't leave."

"But eventually you would have. I knew you were going, you knew it and the boys knew it, so what was the point?"

The point was that he would have left sooner. He would have never let her help him other than to give them a place to sleep for just that one night. He wouldn't tell her that now because the damage was already done. The fire was just the first of the demonic retributions, payback for Jewels as well as a warning to John. Stop hunting the yellow-eyed demon, let things take their course. "Bobby tells me you're leaving in the morning," he said squeezing her hand.

She didn't return the squeeze but didn't let go of his hand either. "Yeah, I figured flying might be hazard to other people's health so he sold me an old Firebird he salvaged. It's got good plates and good tires, gets crappy gas mileage and will still leave most other cars flat footed at the starting line."

John looked at her, sadness in his eyes, and told her, "Jewels, I'm so sorry...about… everything."

"Bobby explained it all to me. He said you really weren't a pig..." she stopped then back peddled, "Okay, he said you really were a pig but that sleeping with Mari wasn't really your fault." A gust of South Dakota wind seemed to blow through the room and Jewels shivered.

John moved over in the bed and, lifting the covers, offered her warmth next to him and she only hesitated for a moment before slipping in beside him, letting him put his arms around her.

Not knowing what kind of crap she'd inadvertently stepped into Jewels was scared, frightened out of her wits about what the future would now hold for her and her daughter. She felt more alone than she'd ever felt in her life and welcomed his warmth and his returning strength. Along with her trepidation Jewels also felt a sadness that weighed so heavily on her that, much to her chagrin, she did the one thing Dean would have chastised her for immediately. She started to cry and not just like a girl but like a baby.

John pulled her closer and tucked her head under his chin and just let he cry until she was out of tears and hiccuping pathetically. "I have a cure for those you know," he told her and, lifting her chin and tilting her face toward him, he kissed her. Then he kissed her again, gently, sweetly and he took her breath away...and her hiccups. John Winchester became a passionate and caring port in Jewels' storm making love to her until she felt safe again, if only for that moment, and then one final time for the road that lay ahead of them.

Spent, they lay together listening to the cold winter wind bluster against the side of the two story house and watched as it occasionally slipped through the cracks to move the flame in the lamp and they talked about how things could be.

"You could bring your daughter back, I'd take care of you, protect you both."

"We could be the Brady Bunch...or the Munsters," she suggested and thanked him for his offer but told him, "I couldn't stand it, not knowing if you were coming back every time you left, not knowing if the mailman was really the mailman or someone trying to take the boys or worse."

She felt like a coward but John understood. He would have taken the chance, taken them in, and even though he barely knew how to protect Sam and Dean as it was, he would have guarded them all with his life. But Jewels had already decided to go home and he would just pray that nothing more would happen to her because what he could never do again was watch a woman he loved die the way Mary had.

"Hopefully Gracie has forgiven me for leaving her with her grandparents for so long and we can get on with our lives. We can wait for you and Sammy and Dean in our little house on the beach. We'll wait until you kill the son of a bitch who's after Sammy and then we can all live happily ever after," she told him then couldn't resist adding, "Unless I get a hot boyfriend."

"You'd do that to me?" John asked laughing softly then ordered, "Go to sleep, Jewels. Sunrise is in a couple of hours."

Jewels was exhausted but she knew if she went to sleep and morning came, as it always did, she'd have to say good bye to Sammy and to Dean. She let out a watery sigh and John pulled her closer and she started to cry all over again.


	30. Chapter 30

Her backpack in her hand, Jewels came down the stairs and Sammy recognized the look on her face. It was the same look his brother had on his when he sat across the table from him at breakfast. Dean hadn't talked and hadn't eaten his hot cakes and, after a while, he just got up, put on his hoodie and went outside. Squatting down next to Sam, Jewels reached around and hugged him and, with a mouth stuffed full of pancakes, the boy turned and threw his arms around her and squeezed her as tight as he could.

"Whoa there Sammy boy, you're crushing me," she laughed, his head tucked under her chin, his hair still wet and smelling of shampoo.

He held on for a couple of moments longer then pulled back in his chair. "Dean says you're going away so I was trying to stick some of me to you so you don't forget me," he mumbled through his mouthful.

Jewels' throat constricted painfully and she couldn't speak for a moment but finally, in a voice more like Minnie Mouse's than her own, she told him, "Awe Sammy, I could never, ever, ever forget you and any time I think I'm about to all I have to do is smell the syrup you stuck to me and I'll remember you." She stood up and leaned in and got a sweet, sticky, little boy kiss she would remember forever.

Bobby watched from the foyer, the keys to the Pontiac in his hand, and with a final touch of Sam's cheek and a ruffle of his wet hair Jewels went to retrieve them. "You remember everything I told you?" he asked brusquely trying to hide every emotion he was having at that moment. Saying goodbye to a very special woman whose life's path may have taken a very bad turn wasn't easy.

"Everything," she assured him, "And the books?"

"In the Firebird," he told her, "I expect them back some day, sooner if there's nothing amiss when you get home."

"Okay," she promised then added, "And Bobby?" He looked at her and she asked him, "Please don't be too hard on him."

"He doesn't deserve your concern," he said gruffly and turned his eyes away.

"Yeah, he does. If nothing else he's all those boys have in the world...besides you," she reminded him and shrugged into a heavy coat. Hoisting the backpack onto one shoulder she leaned in and hugged him.

Bobby returned the favor and hugged her hard, the way Sammy had. "I'm just trying to stick my hopes for a long and happy life to you," he said sincerely and, holding her at arm's length, he added, "You be careful out there."

Completely undone and unable to speak Jewels looked quickly into the parlor and turned panicked eyes back to Bobby. "He's out in his car. It's where he goes when he wants to look at the old girly magazines he doesn't know I know he 'borrowed' from the garage...and when he wants to be alone."

Outside in the cold Jewels walked toward the Volkswagen and saw Dean's head through the back window. He was in the driver's seat so she walked to the opposite side and opened the door. Calling shotgun she got in beside him and saw that he hadn't been looking at Bobby's skin magazines but through the banker's box she had left in the back seat. He had a packet of photographs open and spread out on his lap.

"Who's this," he demanded holding up a picture.

There was no way Jewels' could or would lie to him. It was a snapshot of Jewels on the beach with a smaller version of herself, right down to the blue eyes and golden hair, sitting beside her in the sand. "That's my little girl."

"You got a kid? Where is she?" he demanded again and held the picture up in front of his face to study it more.

"She's with her grandparents, back in Massachusetts."

"Why doesn't she live with you?" he asked turning to squint at her, sizing her up to see if she fit into the crappy parent category that John occasionally fell into.

"I wanted to protect her from the um, you know..."

"The werewolf?"

"Exactly," she told him. She couldn't believe she could say something so ridiculous and keep a straight face but she had said it and, with a chill running down her back, Dean accepted her explanation for what it was.

"What's her name?"

"Grace."

"You mean like God's grace?"

She looked at him, smiled and told him, "You are one smart cookie, Winchester."

Grace Downey was that and so much more. Her little girl was her saving grace, always had been, always would be and going home to her made it not as hard to leave the Winchesters behind. That and knowing that God was now honor bound to take care of His own while she took care of hers. A deal was a deal.

Dean continued to look at the picture running a finger across the ocean behind them.

"I'll make a deal with you," Jewels said as she watched his wonder that such a place existed. A place where people were safe and happy, "If you keep asking God to keep your brother and your dad safe then I'll wait for you right here on this beach. As soon as your dad thinks it's safe, you come."

Dean thought it over, ready to agree but then did the math and wondered who would look out for him, "What about me?" he asked.

"I already made that deal," she told him and pushed him over into his door.

Still the little skeptic he sat back upright and, after mulling it over a little longer, agreed to her deal. Anyway, it couldn't hurt.

"I gotta go now so grab that box for me, will ya?" she asked him and got out of the car. She heard him sigh in exasperation and added, "It isn't that heavy so don't be a goob and drop it."

Dean looked at the picture one more time before gathering it, and the rest of the photos, up and tossing them back into the box. Reluctantly he got out of the bug and leaned in to put the lid back on the box. But before covering it, he grabbed the photo of Jewels and Grace and tossed it onto the front seat.

Jewels held open the driver's door to the Firebird and waited while he loaded in the box and then the two of them stood in awkward silence in the early morning sun and freezing cold, neither one of them ready to say good-bye. She did, however, lean down and gave Dean a kiss on the cheek.

The boy pulled away as if he'd been scalded and when he moved his hand toward his face she snapped, "Don't you dare wipe that off!" The look he gave her screamed short bus and she laughed and told him, "Eeew, Winchester. Do you think I'd kiss the likes of you? That was from Sara at the bar. She wanted me to say good bye for her."

"It's a good thing, 'cause I don't want to kiss you either, ever," he said angrily. His voice cracked as tears starting to slide down his cheeks, "Especially good bye."

This was so unfair, she thought, and tears clouded her own eyes as she pulled him into her embrace. Making me choose between this kid, who is so very, very special and who I couldn't love more if he was my own, and my own flesh and blood. You knew it would be no contest so why do you have to make it hurt so much? she asked God and hugged Dean tighter. She laid her cheek atop his head and her tears dropped into his hair.

John watched them somberly from an upstairs window and wondered what Jewels was telling his son. He knew she knew exactly what to say to him because, as he watched, Dean didn't run away in anger but embraced her in sorrow and with love. He watched as she got into the Pontiac while his son stood his ground, his fists clenched, and John knew it would be rough on him but that Dean would get through it okay.

Jewels rolled down the car window and told Dean, "You keep Gracie and me in your prayers," and started the Fire Bird's engine, "And you keep reminding God every once in a while that a deal's a deal."

Dean nodded and stepped back and the car headed slowly down the driveway. He ran a few steps to keep up and shouted out to her, "Jewels, don't forget your promise to wait for us. A deal's a deal!"


	31. Chapter 31

Sioux City, South Dakota – December 2006

"Hey, Bobby," Sam called out as he searched the rows of rusted hulks that made up the back lot of Singer's Salvage Yard.

"Over here!" came a shouted reply and, two rows over, near the fence, Sam finally found him. The older hunter was standing next to an ancient, faded orange, VW Superbeetle and a smile broke out on Sam's face as he came nearer.

"Dean's first ride," Sam said and rubbed his hand lovingly across the top quickly recalling him and his brother tooling around the salvage yard and occasionally down to the local Dairy Queen when John was gone and Bobby took his eyes off of them for half a second.

"Yeah, I was just checkin' through it and I found this under the back seat. It's got your name on it." Bobby held out a wooden box about 8 inches square on which Sam's name was written in a feminine hand in ink on the top.

"Oh, wow," Sam said with a smile, "I remember this. I got it for Christmas one year."

"Well, what in Pecla's it doin' hidden in Dean's car?"

"You got me." Sam set the box down on the car's roof and opened it. He picked up the folded piece of paper that lay on top and opened it and read aloud.

"Dude,

You're what now, ten? Well, it's about time you stopped hanging onto this because dad already thinks you're gay and he'd be pretty pissed if he knew you were playing with a witch's ball...or your own for that matter. So, I'm putting this in a place where you'll never find it again…unless you're messing around where you don't belong. So leave it where you found it and get the hell out of my car.

Your awesome brother,

Dean Winchester"

Sam looked up at Bobby in complete shock, his face turning crimson while Bobby just laughed, loud and hard. He could just imagine Dean, his head bent over a desk, his pencil gripped tightly in his fingers, writing the letter to his brother then hiding it between the pages of a Playboy magazine until he had time to fold it up and hide it, along with the beautiful glass ball, in the car.

"You really think this is a witch's ball?" Sam asked pulling it from the box and holding it up to the sun.

Bobby examined it from afar and shrugged. "Who knows? Glass balls have been around since the invention of glass. Besides, it's only a myth that witches are dumb enough to fly into one just 'cause it's pretty and sparkly…unless she's Paris Hilton."

Sam was about to put the ball away when he spotted something else that lay nestled in the bottom of the box. He pulled it out and handed it to Bobby while he replaced the ball in the blue silk lining.

Bobby's smile faded as he looked at a photograph. Turning it over he saw something written on the back in Dean's strong handwriting. 'Jewels and Grace Downey' and under it 'Grace Winchester'. Bobby sighed.

"Who is it, Bobby?" Sam wanted to know looking at the the photograph.

"It's Jewels Downey and her little girl. You were only five and Dean had just turned ten so you probably don't remember her. She helped save your dad when he got hurt on a hunt."

Sam thought back and may have vaguely remembered but he couldn't be sure. "Whatever happened to her?"

"When Jewels got home to Massachusetts her parents were dead and," he pointed to the little girl in the picture, "her daughter Grace was gone."

"Jesus…" Sam started.

"Had nothin' to do with it," Bobby interjected, "It was probably Azazel," he had surmised and added, "Anyway, Jewels disappeared. I heard she was hunting for Grace and for the same demon your father was hunting but I haven't heard anything about her for years...not that we're a tight knit group."

Sam turned the photo over and caught a glimpse of a brother he never knew existed. A brother who, at fifteen, had hidden the ball and the photo and who had had a brief fantasy of someday marrying a girl named Grace.

Bobby told him, "Your dad took it real bad and Dean, he took it even worse."

The Impala's powerful engine announced the arrival of his brother with Chinese take-out and Sam stuffed the photo back into the box and closed the lid.

"You gonna put it back?"

"Hell, no," Sam told Bobby and shoved the box under his jacket, "It's mine."

Later that evening, Sam sat in the room he used when staying with Bobby staring at his laptop in search of more information on psychic vampires. He looked over at the newly found glass ball sitting on the table next to the computer and remembered it hanging in different motel room windows as they traveled the country. He also remembered Dean always taking it down before their father returned. Sam guessed Dean had finally gotten tired of keeping his present from Jewels a secret and had ditched it in the Bug.

But his dad was gone now and he didn't have to do what Dean told him anymore and he was strangely drawn to it's delicate shape and beauty.

"Dude!" Dean said sticking his head into the room.

Sam quickly covered the ball with his beanie and turned to see what he wanted.

"I'm headed out to the Do Drop Inn. You game?"

Thankful for a respite from his research, Sam turned off the laptop and picked up his hat but not before moving the ball behind the screen and out of his brother's line of sight. "Yeah, but I'm the pool hustler tonight and you're the hustlee."

"Okay, but who's gonna believe I could ever loose to a jerk like you?"

"Anyone who's ever seen you play, bitch" Sam assured him and, opening the door the rest of the way, he pushing his brother out into the hall.

Their raucous banter died out as they headed down the stairs and out the front door, the search for psychic vampires and the glass ball forgotten for the time being.

As it rested on the table Sam would have had the answer to his question about the beautiful glass ball. It began to spin, slowly at first, then picked up enough speed to move it like a whirling top to the edge of the old wooded desk where it fell to the floor with a crash and shattered into exactly six-hundred and sixty-six tiny shards. An unlucky number in any hunter's book and a portent of things to come in Sam Winchester's forthcoming Season of the Witch.

The End...and the beginning.

Finally! John and Jewels' fateful chance meeting comes to an end. As the story progressed I knew that if I were Jewels the only way I could ever leave Dean, Sam and John behind was for my own family and this way, maybe, just maybe, Dean will have the chance to someday meet Grace.

Thank you all so much for reading along as I wrote and thanks for the kind reviews. Keep an eye out for Season of the Witch.

p.s. If you haven't already recognized Mari and want to know more about her please read Nocturnal Omissions but beware! It's rated M for graphic, gratuitous sex, violence, adult situations and adult language.


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